Ruto should disguise his bile a little and tame all the scorn

Deputy President William Ruto during a church service at Wendani Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK), Nairobi. [David Njaaga, Standard]

Away from these pages, I am many other things. One of them is that I am the secretary general of a political party in my country.

The chances that I see some things through political blinkers are, therefore, real. No matter how objective you consider yourself to be, you probably cannot be too rigorous in your objectivity.

My reader may accordingly proceed to read with the understanding that I have cautioned myself in that regard. For, I want to write about my country’s Deputy President.

My DP has his sights on the same prize – if it is a prize – as my party leader’s. Naturally, I am keen to see my party and its leader gain political ground. You appreciate the potential for conflict of interest in the circumstances.  Yet, I will attempt to be objective. In any event, I don’t doubt that the DP has eminently competent professionals who could proffer an appropriate rejoinder if they are unhappy with what I am about to say. Some of these are people whom I have taught. Others were taught by people I taught.

Kenya’s Deputy President, Dr William Ruto, has an amazing capacity for scornfulness. Equally appalling is his obsessive focus on himself. His self-love is almost narcissistic. Narcissus, you recall, was the mythological Greek hunter who loved himself to a fault. The world and everything in it was about him and his self-centered beauty. So much in love with himself was he that he was the alpha and omega in everything. And so, too, would it appear to be with Ruto.

Here is a gentleman of professed rare achievement. In his own public confessions, he has “risen from rags to riches.” His rise and rise is so fascinating that it confounds him.

He, therefore, flagrantly flaunts both his legendary “humble background” and his mysterious wealth. He rubs both in your face and in your nostril. He literally vomits on your shoes.

On the occasion of his late father’s burial a couple of years back – Kenyans will recall – there was TV footage of the DP showing President Uhuru Kenyatta around his magnificent country home. With a broad smile of arrival and self-fulfillment, he also showed the President the tiny hut he had lived years back, in a manner that said it all: “Don’t joke with me. I am the eighth wonder of the world.”

Every so often, the Eighth Wonder talks of his days as “a hustler.” I do not know whether he means it for real – that he was a hustler – or whether he intends to say something very different, but he is limited by linguistic innocence. If it should be true that he was a hustler, however, then many things begin to fall in place. First is the unknown source of what appears to be his massive wealth. It was achieved hustler style. Not my words, mind you – his own.

The DP often proclaims that he has worked hard for his wealth. Yet it is not enough for a man who seems to be excessively wealthy to tell the world that he has “worked hard.” What is “working hard”? Worked hard where? Doing what? With whom? When?

We say in Emanyulia that if you have been a hunter, the test is that you must say in which part of the forest you hunted. You must also state when and with whom you hunted. Who saw you?

The DP is shy when it comes to talking about the forests he hunted in and who his witnesses are. Yet he will not pause from flaunting the gains from the mysterious forests. And he flaunts them scornfully. Take the example of the so-called National Prayer Breakfast assembly. The DP – as we would say in Emanyulia – poured scorn on his boss, the President. The hubris was in its element. The world heard that the DP was the individual who went to school barefoot. Yet, today he sits at the same table with a person whose father was the country’s first President.

Put differently, Dr Ruto was telling the President, “Look at me. And look at yourself. I was only a miserable poor boy, like Abraham Lincoln. You were a rich man’s son, like George Washington. Today we sit at the same table, Lazarus and Dives. It is not that the environment enables us all to climb. It’s just I have dashed worked hard. I have done far better than you have. That is why I sit here today. I have a lot to thank God for – and to thank myself too – than you have.”

The comportment is at once bold and sneering. It has been rubbed into retired President Moi’s face.

Moi was told to tell his son, Senator Gideon Moi, unprintable things. This because the senator appears to be a threat to the DP in his self-proclaimed stronghold of Kalenjin Rift Valley.

His best punching bag is ODM Party Leader, Raila Odinga. The attacks against him are visceral and shameful. Sometimes – as in a month back – they are expanded to cover an entire community.

The DP would do well to know that he sits only a heartbeat away from the ultimate office in the land. The Constitution recognises that he could be transformed into that office in the twinkling of an eye. Accordingly, he has the heavy responsibility to disguise his bile a little and to tame the scorn and the hubris.

He needs to wear the garb of a unifier all the time, even if it is not his intent to unify. Above all, he should refrain from flaunting his mysteriously acquired wealth, especially in front of those who have paved his paths.   

 - The writer is a strategic public communications adviser.  www.barrackmuluka.co.ke