David Ndii: From a bold thinker to Ruto's controversial power broker

Economist David Ndii. [File, Standard]

For the close to four decades he’s graced public life, David Mwangi Ndii has flown close to the sun, exuding unmistakable intellectual arrogance but also lending the best of his brains to the service of the country. 

The Oxford-trained economist has made zero attempts to be modest on his achievements, has not suffered fools gladly, and is lately- at the peak of his public life- goading over critics of President William Ruto’s administration. 

Like Mutahi Ngunyi in the previous administration, Ndii now occupies a central place in the present kitchen cabinet, serving as the head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. 

Birds of the same feather, both men, through their brains, mouths, and wild ideas, talked their way to the center of power.  

In the early 90’s, Ndii alongside Prof Anyang Nyong’o founded the Institute of Economic Affairs, the first of its kind as a think-tank. Together, they began to build castles in the air, as the ruling KANU and a split opposition squared it out in the rough and tumble of practical politics. 

Of those days, he was described by his comrade John Githongo as “a person of tremendous intellect and moral clarity.” “That combination makes him very profound,” Githongo once said. 

It was during that period that the seminal work- Blueprint for a New Kenya: Post-Election Action Program (PEAP’94) developed by IEA with the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, was produced. 

Partly due to this paper, and other work the organization was undertaking together with Ndii’s group, empowering opposition groups, FNF’s regional director Dorothee von Brentano was expelled from the country. 

Together with its sequel; “Our Problems, Our Solutions” of 1998, “Crossroads: Scenarios for our Future,” PEAP’94, through Ndii, weaved its way into NARC’s Economic Recovery Strategy (ERS) of 2003, and much later into Vision 2030. 

Thus, and long before his present role, Ndii had been one of the country’s most consequential economists, political players, and the “public intellectual” he fancies himself to be. 

Great commentator

However, in that glorious past, Ndii was always swimming in the fringes. He outclassed all in public commentary, in text, audio and video. He wrote many newspaper columns and participated in countless interviews. 

His original forays into NARC administration through Nyong’o were, to a large extent short-lived. No sooner had they begun to implement ERS than NARC imploded from within, and Ndii’s group found itself back in the trenches. 

He would spend the next decade in local and international consultancies, civil society and occasionally rousing up controversy with his writings. It is during this period that he firmed up his brand of politics, the one he called “politics without romance.” 

“Kenya is a cruel marriage, it’s time we talk divorce,” he wrote on March 25, 2016. 

In this article, Ndii proposed the splitting up of Kenya into four nations, Coast, Somali, Luo, and Mt Kenya nations: “Kenya is for the most part an abusive relationship. It is about time we start talking about ending it. This ought not to be a difficult conversation.”

Just when Ndii was giving up on Kenya, he teamed up with his old comrades to give structure and vision to Raila Odinga’s fourth bid for presidency in 2017. Despite a lot of hubris and fire in the belly of the NASA juggernaut, Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner and Ndii’s group was shattered once more.

Not even the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Uhuru’s win could help their lot, as Raila boycotted the repeat poll, handing Jubilee an easy win. A turbulent period ensued, during which Raila was sworn in as the people’s president before he bolted and cut a “handshake” deal with Uhuru.

With the handshake, Ndii and his band of loyalists were left hanging precariously to a lost dream, and with police cases to deal with. Ndii began to slowly but strategically walk away.

He initially found succour in a phantom movement which went by the name Linda Katiba, whose stated purpose was to protect the constitution but which turned out to have been holding brief for his next stop of political wanderings.

Linda Katiba

Then Deputy President William Ruto became the biggest beneficiary of Linda Katiba when they successfully stopped the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) of amending the constitution, spearheaded by his opponents President Uhuru Kenyatta and Ndii’s erstwhile ally, Raila.

 When David Ndii as NASA strategist addressed a press conference over the 2017 disputed presidential results. [File, Standard]

“Linda Katiba's colleagues knew I was in Ruto's team. I mooted the collaboration at a civil society meeting hosted by the Kenya Human Rights Commission. Martha Karua and I consulted with Ruto in Karen on at least two occasions, I remember,” Ndii confessed on May 12 this year.

Plucked by Ruto from civil society to craft Kenya Kwanza’s “The Plan” and to offer intellectual succour to the then fledgling “bottom-up” manifesto, Ndii took the assignment with gusto, perhaps seeing a grand opportunity to bounce back.

“I had never met him until three years ago, we had spoken on the phone a couple of times, but we had never met,” Ndii told a Universal Health Coverage collaborative meeting a few weeks ago.

Fast forward, Ruto won the election, and Ndii took his rightful place at the State House as the head of the CEA. The colours of Ndii began to change, dramatically. The Ndii of government and Ndii the public intellectual turned out to be totally different personas.

The Ndii of government discarded the public intellectual garb and embraced all the practical realities, including evils, of running a base government. He began to easily countenance graft, waste, and impunity.

“The first obligation of a government is political survival and political stability. The more the dynasties foment destabilization the more we will have to spend on political capital,” he wrote on X.

Perched at the centre of power, Ndii now began to see the government as a necessary evil. At its core, he’s said, is a co-existence pact that occasionally breaks down into orgies of violence.

 “The rest is frills and fanciful romance,” he says.

Day by day, he began to grow more and more impatient with those who raised a voice against Ruto's policies, something he did for many years against Moi, Kibaki and Uhuru.

“Go drying,” “githeri media”, “empty-head”, “imbecile”, and “warthog” suddenly became his responsorial terms to critics. The opposition he played for, suddenly became child play.

When Senator Ledama Ole Kina attempted to challenge him on alleged congestion in the port of Mombasa, he dismissed his views as “cattle-herding logic”, reminding him ports are not cattle bomas.

“Grin and bear it,” he told Waikwa Wanyoike when he demanded a legal framework to guide and circumscribe the mandate of the Office of the First Lady Rachel Ruto.

He began to feel nothing about the Judiciary and its activism, which he said only breeds more corruption and diminished judicial authority. Between an order to stop by the Chief Justice of Kenya Martha Koome, and a police constable, Ndii would only, promptly obey the latter.

Political hecklers

His pro-NASA views on overtaxing a comatose economy evaporated in the thin air. He now claimed those views were in the context of Covid era, and that markets have since opened.

“That popping sound you hear is Azimio bubble bursting,” he would occasionally take a break to throw a jibe.

He now could not debate “youth wingers” and “hecklers” who were in diapers when he was debating their fathers.

“The political debate in the country is, to a very considerable extent, about my ideas. The thought of sharing a platform with political hecklers is hilarious,” he wrote on X.

More and more, he took greater pride in himself as the sculptor of Bottom Up philosophy which he placed beside the two other consequential ideas of independent Kenya; African Socialism of 1965 and Second Liberation of the early 90’s.

He defended the political reward system against professional cadres, saying that prioritizing the cadres over those who sacrificed for Kenya Kwanza is to live in a fool’s paradise.

There is no better season to study the new Ndii than the run-up to the Gen Z protests and their aftermath. He openly relished in the “political impotence of the chattering classes”, and called the protesters “digital wanks”, mocking the protesters as “cool kids”.

 “Politics is a contact sport. Digital activism is just wanking. Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one,” he wrote on June 14.

 Unarguably, Ndii’s rhetoric at this time spewed from the comfort of his State House office, added fuel to the fire of the protesters who are avid consumers of social media.

He was unapologetic, unrepentant. When Gen Zs set about to “greet” public figures, he described them as “children of the plunderers who have bankrupted the state” and the “corruption cartels I have been battling since before they were born.”

And when he saw his old comrades trying to lend a hand to the protesters, he called them out:

“Willy, our time in the trenches is up. We fought for a new political dispensation. We achieved it. You may not like the people in power benefiting from your struggle but who Kenyans choose is not your call.”

He railed the former Chief Justice for missing the turning point and asked him to come to terms with it. On the day protesters flattened the Parliament fence, Ndii was flattening people on X, calling them warthogs.

Yet, the Bill which had caused the ruckus was, by and large, his brainchild, together with his team of economic advisors. The man who paid the ultimate price for it, Prof Njuguna Ndung’u the Finance CS, was simply the face of it.

The team had been getting away with everything since they were appointed. The Finance Bill of 2023 had equally been unpopular but they had managed to have it passed. The dropping of the subsidies program too.

Consolidating power

Caught flatfooted by the intensity of the protests, the president admitted he could have listened more to what the people were saying. But Ndii and people around the presidency insisted that these were no ordinary protests, a position the president slowly adopted.

“Leaderlessness opened the youth peaceful Finance Bill protest, which I support, to infiltration by delusional anarchists. I speak from experience. I am a veteran of the streets,” he tweeted.

In the aftermath of the protests, Ndii took every chance to mock them, describing them as rudderless, tactless and clueless. On August 18, he gloated that Ruto had pulled the rug from under the feet of the protesters, and was now consolidating his political power.

The Ndii in government has made it clear that it is no longer his work to fight corruption in government. Long before Kenya Kkwanza won, he put the country on notice that they were not running on an anti-corruption platform.

Much later when in government, he declared that he had long paid his dues on matters fighting corruption through his stellar work at Transparency International. And this while corruption was throbbing in government.

“I am not your watchdog. Do your work!"

And as murmurs filtered through on what appeared to be a serious conflict of interest, and possibly corruption relating to the Adani Group web on interest in the Kenyan economy, Ndii rubbed it further:

“Let me restate: We will leave Kenya as corrupt as we found it. On this Sunday, I suggest you contemplate your own life and leave the other sinners to contemplate theirs,” he wrote on September 15.

Despite all these, there is a consensus which appears to find favour with President Ruto, that the man knows his stuff. Very few people who know his history would begrudge his economics acumen or hold a candle to his intellect.  

He had his fair share of time in the trenches and did an amazing job. Those who know also say his backroom work in stabilizing the economy after the odious borrowing spree of the previous administration is somewhat commendable.