Real 'dynasties' have come back together, can fresh 'hustlers' voice emerge?

President William Ruto, former President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga during the launch of the Building Bridges Initiative report at Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi, on November 27, 2019. [File, Standard]

In the beginning, the Opposition characterised President William Ruto’s government as a skunk. They described it as a rotten and cursed entity, the one animal that reeks worse than any sewer. On November 27, 2023, ODM leader Raila Odinga told a cheerful gathering, “Everywhere you touch this Ruto government, it is rotten.”

Raila went on, “It stinks. Why? It is a curse from God. They stole. They swallowed. It got stuck in the throat. And it will never move from there. We are only waiting for them to collapse.”  

And during the vetting of Dr Ruto’s inaugural Cabinet, nominated MP and ODM National Chairman John Mbadi concluded his declamatory remarks on the floor of the National Assembly with the clarion call, “Let us give Ruto his skunk!”

Hardly halfway through its first term, however, nearly half of Cabinet Secretaries are now from the Opposition Azimio La Umoja Alliance, the foiled cocktail of political parties that President Uhuru Kenyatta and Odinga fashioned in the lead up to the August 2022 presidential poll. If the Kenya Kwanza government was the skunk it was styled as, its foul character makes it the proverbial decaying pig’s head on a stick. It attracts eager political insects; giant bluebottles and sundry political insects in the dreadful class that scientists call drosophila melanogaster. They fly into the trap with ease. 

First into the Ruto Venus flytrap was the Azimio and ODM party leader, Raila Odinga. Even as he initially equivocated and prevaricated with ambiguities and denials, he successfully negotiated for the inclusion of five ODM politicians in Ruto’s post Gen-Z protests Cabinet, in August. That was how Ali Hassan Joho, Wycliffe Oparanya, Opiyo Wandayi, and John Mbadi of the dramatic skunk fame, and Beatrice Askul, found their way to the Cabinet. The triad of Mbadi, Joho and Wandayi have since become President Ruto’s star apologists. Joho leads the consort, daring anybody to rub Ruto the wrong way. 

And now the Azimio Alliance chairman, retired President Uhuru Kenyatta, has nominated his own three men to the Cabinet, besides several others in assorted senior positions in the Ruto government. Mutahi Kagwe, William Kabogo, and Lee Kinyanjui, are up for vetting by the National Assembly, for inclusion in the Cabinet. The dynamics have gone full circle. Elements that could only mix to the extent that oil and water can mix, begin to gel and define themselves as a common entity, in what Ruto calls a broad based government.

The advent of the so-called broad-based government, and especially the arrival of Uhuru into these quarters, presents solid food for thought. What seems to be going on? How is it going to shape the political arena and governance in the country?  What does it portend for the 2027 elections? Is it only a makeshift stopgap measure that seeks to save Captain Bill and his MV Kenya Kwanza from sinking, or is it designed for bigger stuff towards the next presidential election? 

What of President Ruto’s hold on to the reins of power in this triple alliance? Is Ruto still in charge, or is Azimio stealthily taking over? Has Ruto lost the government to his 2022 competitors? How legitimate is the broad based government, seeing that the Constitution of Kenya (2010) is very clear on how government is formed? In point of fact, Article 3(2) of the Constitution expressly says: “Any attempt to establish a government otherwise than in compliance with this Constitution is unlawful.” Where does this leave a broad based government that circumnavigates the Constitution and the Political Parties Act on formation of coalitions before and after elections? 

It is the best of times and the worst of times, as the iconic English novelist Charles Dickens (1812–1870) famously said of the age of revolutions in Europe. It is at once the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness. The season of light and season of darkness; the spring of hope and the winter of despair. And the reasons are many.

For a start, the question is being asked, why would Kenya’s political noblesse oblige class, that so vehemently excoriated Ruto and his hustler fancies, turn coat to ensconce itself in the atria and ventricles of his government? Why Uhuru who, together with the entire Kenyatta family, has been bedraggled into style-like muddle by the Ruto regime take refuge in the Ruto government?

Uhuru Kenyatta is Kenya’s new enigmatic political operative. He refuses to fade away from the arena, two years after he is supposed to have retired. His name loomed large at the Ruto inauguration in September 2022. Thereafter, Ruto’s now disgraced ex–deputy carried his antipathy for the Kenyatta name on his sleeve. He dressed it up in appalling invective that knew no boundaries, often dragging in Mama Ngina Kenyatta, Kenya’s First Lady whom those who grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s adored and venerated.

Rigathi Gachagua, Ruto’s first deputy president, will have been old enough to know that Mama Ngina was always a no-go zone. She could only be spoken of endearingly, or otherwise in whispers and silent tones. Despite any reservations they may have about her and the Kenyatta family, Kenya’s older generations have in their hearts a special place for this matron and her family. They would not countenance some of the things that were said of her at the pinnacle of the UhuRuto fallout, and after.

But so seductive was Ruto’s hustler gospel that the Mt Kenya region refused to listen to Uhuru, when he preached against Ruto during the 2022 election campaigns.

“You will come to rue,” Uhuru repeatedly told his Mt Kenya compatriots, “Someday, you are going to understand the true character of the person you are dealing with. And never say that I did not warn you!”

Regardless, the Mountain refused to heed Uhuru’s caution. They instead fashioned songs of ridicule, with which they lampooned him and his candidate, Odinga, in awful messages. They would tell him to his face that nobody can steamroll them, “Hatupanguingwi, ” they said. They promised to consign him to his native village of Ichaweri in Kiambu, and Odinga to Bondo.

In the 2023 Maandamano protests against the Ruto government in its infancy, the Uhuru name came up again. This time Kenya Kwanza accused Uhuru and the wealthy club of billionaires who operate under the sobriquet of Mount Kenya Foundation (MKF) of sponsoring the protests. The government clamped down on them by suffocating their business interests. State corporations were quietly directed to close business dealings with entities seen to be sympathetic to Azimio. Sucked into the chaos were banks, media houses and sundry mega business concerns. To date, many are still reeling from adversity, as the aftermath. Many are in dire financial straits, some have downsized, and many face folding up and even foreclosure.

But such measures were not considered enough for Uhuru and the Kenyatta family. Their investments suffered both verbal and physical assault. Family property was accosted. Rare breeds of sheep, bred for special markets, were either ferreted away, or wantonly slain, or both. Mama Ngina made the rare move of ventilating her grief in public condemnation of the assault. Also harassed were Uhuru’s adult children, whose upmarket residence was raided by masked state agents, and stuff carried away. An angry Uhuru challenged Ruto to leave his mother and children alone, and to instead bring it up on him, at a personal level.

Then the Gen-Z uprising came, and with it new dynamics.

First, a perplexed government blamed a cocktail of persons and entities for what it called “sponsoring” the uprising. Not surprisingly, Uhuru was once again a soft target. But then the targets kept shifting, clearly suggesting that the Ruto State had been caught with its pants down. And it was at this point that the tides of the times began changing visibly. Gachagua blamed the National Intelligence Services for sleeping on the job. The Ruto innermost sanctums were not amused. Gachagua had taken the first step on his journey to political katabasis. A flawed but successful impeachment process followed. It was time to reinvent and repackage the name Uhuru Kenyatta.

From a ridiculed individual, Uhuru transformed into “Our beloved son Uhuru Kenyatta.” Gachagua regretted the political mistreatment Uhuru had suffered at his behest. He made repeated public apologies, without attracting any open positive response. One thing was clear though, Uhuru was still a force to reckon with in the Mountain, despite the thinking that he could be replaced as a trustworthy voice in the region.

The Mountain began getting disaffected with President Ruto almost as soon as he took over the reins of power. His tax policies hit the Mountain people hard, as Kenya’s most strident business community. These people have witnessed shrinkage in their agribusiness, commerce, and industry. But their consumers have also been hit, to the extent that they are not able to spend at previous viable levels. The promises that Ruto made to the hustler community dried up on his lips soon after he brought down the Bible, and admired the sword. The hustlers are on their own, as are other Kenyans. They bear the brunt of harsh taxation, a dysfunctional healthcare protection system, an unaffordable university funding model, incessant industrial action that paralyses normal enterprise, youth unemployment, and a myriad of other frustrations at the call of a government that spent its first ten months on happy-go-lucky self-edifying consumerism.

It has been on account of the pejorative profile of the Ruto government that Uhuru’s rating as their true Njamba Nene, the Great Hero, in the Mountain has been on the rise. The more Ruto has been reviled, the greater the Uhuru name and image has soared.

Then, suddenly, Njamba Nene embraces the person whom the region considers to be the Lord of the Flies. One more giant fly caught up in Kenya’s Venus flytrap. What are these people to say, of the one man they once loved, then loathed, but were beginning to love, once again? Their new found love for him was a factor of their emerged revulsion for the man Uhuru preached against. So, will they migrate again with him back to the same man he did not like, but now seems to like, but whom they no longer like?

It is truly the season of light and season of darkness; the spring of hope and the winter of despair. In his new space, Uhuru would seem to have no pillars, or only very weak pillars at most. His MPs were herded away into UDA at the start of the Ruto regime. Then these MPs joined others in eating themselves with the Finance Bill 2024. After that, they once again joined the rest in eating their own man, Riggy G, in the impeachment saga. And so Uhuru has no pillars in Parliament. But he also has no pillars outside Parliament. His people rejected him in 2022 and were only beginning to accept him again, and to become his new pillars. But, for whatever merits he may have seen, he has accepted admission into Kenya kwanza atria, auricles, and ventricles, regardless of the political consequences. Clearly, the people have been left at the crossroads. They will be wondering what to do next, and who should lead them.

If it is the winter of despair in the Mountain, and in Kenya at large, it is also the spring of hope. For history has taught us that moments and circumstances give rise to new great leaders. The Kenya Kwanza broad based government has placed the country at the crossroads where Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

President Ruto has taken his tide at the flood. Others, too, in the Mountain and beyond, may have to recognize the flood and the tides of the times, and take theirs at the flood, too. The marketplace talk is that the Kenya Kwanza Government is the skunk that Mbadi and Odinga said it was. Anyone, and everyone, who goes that way gets soiled. The market is saying that Kenya Kwanza is beyond redemption. President Ruto is keenly aware of the rising tide which he has christened “the work of the Devil.” He talks of the terrible demon who is opposed to everything that his government is doing, including taking alms to places of prayer. The frustration is there for all to see, in the President’s violent verbal eruptions, and use of unparliamentary idiom. He is clearly on the backfoot. The people are acting, and the President is reacting. Unfortunately for him, he is mostly angrily justifying himself, and blaming faceless and nameless persons and entities.  

But the President does not end there. He is reaching out to hitherto very unlikely quarters, to stem the tide and spread the risk. It is the age of wisdom, and the age of folly. If he locks up his adversaries in his space, he reduces the voices that will scream against him. He might also just lock in the rest of the people with their perceived leaders. But is it also time for those considered minions in the political space to begin rising to the occasion? And they are many.

Okiya Okoiti Omutatah, Martha Karua, Jimi Wanjigi Maina, Willy Mutunga, and Ekuru Aukot, are among the feeble voices that remain consistent in the Opposition space. Yet they are far too feeble, they remind us of the allegorical Everyman character in the world of literature. Everyman is slow and feeble, until when the situation gets sufficiently disastrous as to call for urgent virulent action. The name David Maraga is also being whispered at the marketplace. Mukhisa Kituyi flares up and disappears. Then there is, of course, the Wiper leader, Kalonzo Musyoka. Who among these people has the fire in the belly and the organisational and mobilisation abilities it takes to lead a nation that is unhappy with the massing of elite political troops in a corner that the elite have themselves described as the house of the skunk?

It is the best of times and the worst of times.  In this season of light and darkness, Kenyans face the choice of collectively becoming a skunk nation, on the one hand, and being reborn as wholesome new people. The gathering of the political elite in one boat easily frames the 2027 election question. Will it be the people against the skunks, or the skunks with the people? 

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.