Re-education of Prezzo Ruto following his forays in NY, eating 'humble pie'

President William Ruto (centre), Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and Environment Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale (right)  take a walk on the streets of New York before attending the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the UN headquarters. [PCS]

I wanted to write about the implosion in Kenya Kwanza, where Deputy Prezzo Rigathi Gachagua aka Riggy G is facing the music, but I was more drawn to the humiliating spectacle in New York where Prezzo Bill Ruto was forced, as Kenyan media reported, “to eat a humble pie.”

New York’s most famous cuisine is probably pizza or cheesecake, which he may or may not have eaten, given that no food items were displayed in the picture of Prezzo Ruto meeting the leadership of Ford Foundation and where he hailed the outfit’s role in championing Kenya’s “democracy.”

It increases feels like autocracy — with daylight abductions of peaceful citizens, and hard-nosed policemen who disregard court orders for their release — but this change of heart, only months after Prezzo Ruto claimed the non-profit was out to destabilise his administration, was baffling.

As Prezzo Ruto likes to remind us, every time his decisions appear at odds with reality, his act of eating the legendary “humble pie” in New York was done with a clear mind, even when he says one thing at home and does quite another abroad.

To jog your memory, an animated Prezzo Ruto, in one of those Kaunda suits, stepped out of the Nairobi State House to address his first public rally, after being grounded for weeks, to call out Ford Foundation for sponsoring anarchy in Kenya and threatening to kick them out.

Well, well, I don’t remember where Prezzo went to school, but his disdain for history is well documented. Consequently, he failed to read an important book on how American imperialism works.

And since Prezzo Ruto has academic pretensions — I don’t mean that disparagingly, I mean he has a title before his name, like some 20,000 Kenyans who hold doctorates—I will refer him to a recent book, White Malice, by the British academic Susan Williams.

The book documents how Africa’s nascent democracy was subverted from taking root in the continent by the Americans. This was done by undermining democratic leaders like Patrice Lumumba, who resisted the continued exploitation of his country’s resources like uranium—which Americans used to pound Japan into submission and claim victory in World War II.

Stuart Reid’s The Lumumba Plot documents the gruesome murder of Lumumba by the CIA: “Sulfuric acid turned Lumumba into a mass of mucus.

But the bones and teeth survived, and when the acid ran out, Katanga’s Belgian Police Commissioner, Gerard Soete and his brother Michael doused the remaining parts with gasoline and set them aflame…”

That was in January 1961. In April 1962, a major literary conference was held at Makerere University College in Uganda. It was funded by a little-known Paris-based entity, Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). As history has taught us, this was an undercover operation instigated and funded by the CIA to assert America’s “soft power.”

The CIA hoped the narratives emerging from the continent would detract attention from US role in Africa’s plunder, as in Lumumba’s murder, or Kwame Nkurumah’s ouster and eventual death in exile in Romania in 1972. At its peak, CCF was active in 35 countries.

I have no way of telling if Ford Foundation may or may not be part of that complex American hegemony. Since Riggy G tells us the NIS is clueless about the goings-on, one can only wait to read future history books.

I bet a chapter will detail this week’s spectacle where Prezzo Ruto ate “humble pie” in the land of the brave and the free and is likely to return home sounding shackled and uncertain.