Mr President, anger will not help you deliver or win Kenyans' trust

President William Ruto during the Kenya Navy 60th Anniversary Celebrations at the Kenya Navy Base Mtongwe in Mombasa, on December 14, 2024. [PCS]

Regardless of the occasion or circumstances, a presidential pronouncement is expected to be a rational imperative. It is framed to withstand the laws of logic, irrespective of the attitudes of individuals, or even collective groups, towards it.  

Those who advise presidents, or otherwise participate in curating their public messages, do well to remember this. Communications from on high are likely to be fatally flawed if they are rendered in levity, or as miscellaneous self-exculpatory tirades. Anger communicates a huge sense of frustration.

It speaks to impatience and deficiency in the art of persuasion. Hence, the leader is drawn into firing unfortunate invective against his adversaries. These adversaries begin losing clear identity. They become shifting targets, and sundry variables for verbal assault.  

President William Ruto has lately engaged Kenyans with troubling displays of anger and frustration. He has called those opposed to vaccination of bovines “mad men, enemies of the country, and stupid.” He has also said governors who allege that someone in the National Government forced them to sign leased medical equipment documents are “stupid fools.”  

When communication descends to these levels, clearly, there is a problem. And such a problem cannot be solved by piling anger upon anger. It requires facing the facts squarely. President Ruto and his retinue in Kenya Kwanza don’t have a problem. They have problems.

During the 2022 election campaigns, it was his popular refrain that there were no more fools left in Kenya. Would his problems seem to have begun with his forgetting this categorical imperative?  

Team Kenya Kwanza has forgotten that it signed 47 county charters with voters. It has also forgotten that these voters are not fitted with cold porridge storage chambers in their heads. For, where it should address the 47 charters, this team is focused on a hotchpotch of optics and publicity stunts. The propaganda team assembles somewhere to ask, “What should we tell them today?”  

Someone comes up with brilliant statistics that show how the country has become very rich, without the citizens themselves also becoming rich. Another one comes up with an even better idea. There is a bad spirit in the country, he says. This spirit is making Kenyans oppose everything the government is doing.

Hence, the government must not only deal with its 47 charters, it must also deal with spirits, by rebuking them angrily, and calling those they possess “mad and stupid enemies.”

The man behind the national steering wheel is called upon to embrace equanimity of the highest order, especially in difficult times. In the face of the present difficult economic times, composure and practical reassurance is what Kenyans want from their leaders.

But, assurance cannot come from whitewashed statistics on employment, such as those the government has been unleashing. Nor can they come from gusty public drama by VVIPs. Such drama speaks, instead, about trouble in paradise.  

But is there a spirit in Kenya, hostile to Kenya Kwanza? Yes. And it’s not just one spirit. There is the spirit of unhappiness, working together with the spirit of restlessness. The two have been triggered off by the spirit of mistrust. Mr President, this column told you in March this year that trouble was brewing, because Kenyans were unhappy with your government.

You saw the explosion in June, three months later. The bad news for you is that Kenyans are still unhappy, only that they are now more unhappy. Maybe those who should tell you are so afraid of you that they cannot tell you. You see, in the kiosks where I take tea in Jericho and Kawangware, and in the exclusive five star places where I sample caviar, the language is the same.

Your government’s management of the economy is frustrating the country. Kenyans also believe there is compulsive lying in the government, an attitude of indifference to their suffering, and an unbridled desire to steal. 

Then you have gone to Ichaweri? Angry people are saying that you seem to have forgotten that you campaigned against Ichaweri dynasties. That in only two years, you now have a dynasty of your own. Hence, you are reaching out to dynasties you disliked two years ago, to jointly suffocate hustlers with them.

But others see rays of hope in this. They say you are carrying a skunk. That everyone who helps you to carry the skunk marks himself with the smell. They say they have an appointment with all skunk carriers in 2027. Anger and name calling may not help. Consider rebooting, if you have the means. 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser

www.barrackmuluka.co.ke