How Ruto like Uhuru before him, is fast losing trust and power

When former President Uhuru Kenyatta announced the cabinet secretaries at the statehouse flanked by then Deputy President William Ruto. [File, Standard]

There are times when opportunity and hardships inspire brilliance to produce long-lasting work. In 1513, a Florentine courtier, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a little book, The Prince, on how to acquire and maintain power that has acquired the status of 'gospel' in Western political discourse.

It is part of classics that include Plato's Republic elitism championing governance by philosophers, slave dealer John Locke's Second Treatise on Government contradicting himself with his 'natural rights' argument that excluded Africans, Thomas Paine's Common Sense calling for the overthrow of colonial governance, and Karl Marx's Capital/Communist Manifesto stressing class warfare. Machiavelli dominates general thinking on power which, Henry Kissinger supposedly claimed was 'great aphrodisiac'. It at least intensifies the rivalry between the inheritor and the grabber.

Occasionally, the inheritor and the grabber join forces to confront a mutual challenge after which they turn on each other. It happened with a short-lived collaboration in Kenya between Uhuru Kenyatta, the inheritor, and William...