President William Ruto is learning the hard way and very publicly that personnel is policy. From the day he took office, he has repeatedly demonstrated that appointments are not his strong suit.
His first cabinet was one of the weakest in our history. His choices of Principal Secretaries have left a lot to be desired. He had to fire his chosen Deputy President through a most unedifying impeachment process.
Most of his senior advisers are little more than recycled failed politicians. The same goes for the hordes of appointments to various state institutions.
It is therefore not surprising that nearly everything the Kenya Kwanza administration touches – from health, to education, to infrastructure, to trade regulation – turns to dust. Garbage in, garbage out.
To his credit, President Ruto has admitted failure. He has recently asked the new crop of Cabinet Secretaries to sign performance contracts and plans to appoint new Principal Secretaries.
However, his words and deeds still betray a man who wants to have his cake and eat it.
For example, when the Catholic Church criticised his administration, he tried to silence them with a donation (the Church declined the cash, and was reinforced by statements from other denominations).
The continued appoints of deeply corrupt and ineffective politicians to critical posts makes a mockery of his claims of a renewed focus on delivery. And perhaps most importantly, his administration is still all talk on corruption.
What explains the president’s inability to right the ship? Two explanations come to mind.
First, the president is tied down by the quality of people in the coalition that brought him to power.
There is only so much that a coalition of chancers of limited ambition can achieve; and it is the president’s great undoing that his insecurity is preventing him from getting better talent further afield.
Second, the president is simply stuck in the desire to govern like those before him – the obscene pursuit of opulence, insouciance with regard to policy, vast patronage networks fueled by corruption, and dripping disdain for regular Kenyans.
In other words, this is the only model of “being president” that he can imagine.
Unfortunately for Ruto, Kenya has changed and will not wait for him to exorcise these ghosts. It is astonishing how much legitimacy he has hemorrhaged in just over two years.
And is even more astonishing that the president’s response so far has been propaganda and empty stunts like performance contracts.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
