Why Ruto must sack sycophants, pick sharp team to drive agenda

President William Ruto. He must sit down to think, listen, read, and govern. [File, Standard]

Kenya Kwanza regime has a plateful of worries to set aside before it could be confident that public rage against it will not return.

The president should move swiftly to address grievances behind the current unrest since the military might not suppress any uprising. 

When it rains, it pours. As the egg on President William Ruto’s face over the disgraced Finance Bill 2024 was forming into dry plaster, his deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, was refining a media polemic. His thunder would go on to caricature the president’s address to the nation on the flopped Bill.

Confused, internally disjointed, and lacking unity of purpose and direction is easily how best to describe the Kenya Kwanza government in recent times. It has been a season of converging precedents, none endearing.

At the apex has been the bringing of the military into the streets, and the subsequent surrender and withdrawal of the Bill by President Ruto. The military has come in to maintain the peace and to protect critical public infrastructure. It is a testament to the fact that the Kenya Police, on their own, cannot be trusted to perform this civilian role. 

The gazette notice that has brought the military into traditional civilian spaces cited peace, public safety and protection of critical infrastructure as the prompters. The Cabinet Secretary for Defence, Aden Duale, when signing the notice, invoked various elements of the law and the Constitution, to legitimise this extraordinary move.

The High Court lent further credence to this legitimacy by throwing out a petition by the Law Society of Kenya (LSK). LSK questioned the legitimacy of the notice. It prayed for the court to send the boots back to the barracks. Justice Lawrence Mugambi, however, gave the government a sigh of relief, at the crack of twilight on Friday. 

At the time of this writing, Duale was expected to file another gazette notice, in line with the High Court’s determination. He was expected to cover grey areas in the earlier notice, so as to circumscribe the things that the military can do during the time they will help the police to keep order. But, while Kenya Kwanza will be breathing the air of relief after court ruling, it has cause to worry about its own legitimacy.

For, the military is easily seen to be in the streets not to protect the country, or critical installations from hostile external aggression. It is about the citizens. There is the school of thought that they are here to stem ventilation of outrage by a largely unarmed civilian population – and most of it of teenage character, and a percentile in its twenties. 

Public outrage

The Constitution of Kenya, of course, recognises that public outrage could degenerate into dangerous unrest, and generate instability. That is why the framers of the Constitution provided for military intervention to contain extreme happenings, under Article 241(3)c. A cocktail of other laws and statutes also legitimise the kind of military intervention now in effect.

The elliptical space in the matter of legitimacy, however, is that of the legitimacy of the Kenya Kwanza government, in the public mind. Founders of Liberal thought and government, such as John Locke (1632–1704), concerned themselves thoroughly with questions of legitimacy of governments that would claim to be democratic. Legitimacy, said Locke, reposed in the separation of powers by institutions of governance. In Two Treatises, Locke spoke of “how the force for the Commonwealth shall be employed.”

However he looked at it, he saw that for a government to be legitimate, it must embrace and exist in division and separation of responsibilities and powers. While the military may, for example, intervene to secure the peace, the legitimacy of the regime itself resides in the general will of the governed. When the military intervenes to secure peace, it creates a disturbing grey area. Does it come in to safeguard the people and their property, or does it – instead – come in to protect the regime from the wrath of aggrieved citizens? 

The Kenya Kwanza government will want to remove, at the very earliest possibility, any perception that the military is in civilian spaces to shield the Executive from the citizens. As a democratically elected regime, it will want to persuade itself, the citizens, and the rest of the world, of the intactness of its democratic credentials.

Among these is that the Ruto regime is still capable of standing criticism and public ventilation of grief and grievance. Next is that it is not hiding its weaknesses behind a military curtain. That will happen only after the military itself returns to the barracks, and the people are free to mobilise and picket without fear of running into soldierly hardware and hazard.

But this is easier said than done. For, the Ruto regime has a plateful of worries to set aside before it could be confident that public ventilation against it will not return – again – to the apogee of angry youth overrunning the police, to rout key public installations, like they did with Parliament on Thursday. Besides, the demographic at the core of the uprising in Kenya is itself unprecedented. The unrest has been spearheaded by an urbane and sophisticated middle class youth. Such activity is usually understood to belong to boorish reprobates and hirelings, believed to act at the behest of political classes, often with axes to grind. 

The classy character of the picketers across the country left the State gasping. The Leader of the Majority in the National Assembly Kimani Ichung’wa excoriated them with invective to the effect that they arrived in uber taxis, touting iPhones, and later retreating to sample delectable viands, victuals and libations in exclusive eateries. Which they probably did. But this alone, should give the State sleepless nights. For, the middle class is not known for its anxiety over the public good. It is an inward-looking demographic that eschews grouped demonstrations and public affray.

Cataclysmic public events that have routed regimes in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos; Iran under the Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi; Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, and more recently Sri Lanka under Gotabaya Rajapaksa, show that middle class civilians, who consider themselves to be apolitical, can be prime movers in sudden revolutionary uprisings.

No amount of military might has been known to stem such uprisings. Accordingly,  Kenya Kwanza will have to move swiftly to address the grievances behind the current unrest. The military can only give them momentary legroom, which they must tap to get back to their factory settings, and hopefully give themselves a fresh lease of life. 

Self-reflection

For starters, President Ruto will want to reflect both on himself and, next to that, his government. He will want to be honest with himself on his ability to receive, absorb and embrace divergent opinion. Does he listen? If he does, what is the quality of opinion he receives? And who does he listen to? Does he have around him respectful but intrepid, knowledgeable, and experienced individuals who can tell him the truth the way it is?  Or, is he festooned in a forest of ignoramus sycophants and sundry hunters of personal fortune? It is likely that the latter is the case. 

Where were the State security intelligence apparatus, to know and tell the centre that Armageddon was in the offing? Gachagua has distanced himself from responsibility, pointing fingers at the head of the National Intelligence Services (NIS), Mr Noordin Haji, and calling for his resignation. It would be expected that such an agenda as Gachagua has brought to the public space should be prosecuted behind closed State doors. That he elects to spill the beans in an unprecedented deputy presidential outburst is indicative of a dysfunctional centre. 

Instructively, Gachagua elected to thunder only a few minutes after his boss addressed the same concerns, taking a completely different vector. It was not just a breach of protocol; it was also a breach of security. Gachagua has been on the warpath for a while now, borrowing and reading from his boss’s style guide, when Ruto was himself the deputy president. 

For his part, President Ruto should, by the time of this file, have asked his entire Cabinet to resign. He cannot concede defeat without conceding those who failed to help him. He should also be rethinking his leadership in Parliament, all the way to the Speaker of the National Assembly.

How, in the face of deafening public outcry, did they allow such a loathed Finance Bill to get that far, and with such heavy damage all round? Why did none of these State officers tell the president that the Bill would not fly? The president will do himself a lot of good to press the restart key on all of them, in order to put together a team that is made of sterner stuff.  

But, whatever else he does, or leaves undone, President Ruto must rethink the National Treasury and Planning portfolio; the Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service office, and the homeboys around the Presidency – those who understand that they are the de facto presidency; the security docket; and the economic advisory. Then he must also review his attitude towards corruption and the individuals behind it, both as executors and fighters.

Finally, he must rethink his love for being airborne, and sojourning in foreign spaces. He must sit down to think, listen, read, and govern. And he must work fast to send the military back to where they belong; to a place very close to my name. If not, the classy boys and girls will soon be back, with the less sophisticated in tow. 

[Dr Barrack Muluka, PhD [Politics & International Relations, Leicester, UK], Strategic Communications Adviser]