How Gen Z has broken Ruto's Midas touch on political projects
Columnists
By
Kamau Ngotho
| Aug 10, 2024
Despite his pretensions of coming from a hustler background and being an underdog who nevertheless made it, President William Ruto is actually a dynasty by association.
He wasn’t born into wealth or fame, but fate and luck made him dine with the Kings and end up as one so to speak.
Even more striking is his luck at hacking it out to the top the first time he sets his eyes on a political project.
I have seen President Ruto at close quarter only once. It was about two decades ago in early 2005 when he was the MP for Eldoret North constituency. He happened to be driving himself in a brand new top-of-the-deck Range Rover. I was in my small Toyota Corolla and both of us were caught in the jam at the busy Uhuru Highway. He looked well-fed with plump chicks (they have since shrunk by virtue of age and the stress of the high offices he has held since then).
Pilgrimage to Kabarak
Unlike me, my Eldoret journalist friend Barry Salil knows and has watched Mr. President from close quarters, beginning from their high school days at Wareng’ Secondary and Kapsabet High Schools. He tells me that the president-to-be was the ambitious type from those early days.
When in high school, recalls the old classmate, young Ruto had his sights set high and aspired to greatness. “He used to tell us he would grow up to be a bishop, a DC or a cabinet minister”, recalls the President’s old classmate. In those days the DCs (District Commissioners) were the equivalent of today’s county governors, only that they didn’t have a budget, though with equivalent appetite to illegally dip their fingers in the till when circumstances allowed.
Aligned stars
Luckily for young Ruto, his big ambitions fell and sprouted on good soil of right connections and being at the right place at the right time.
Ruto stars began to align well on entry to the University of Nairobi in the last quarter of 1980s. It came about when then President Daniel arap Moi saw him for the first time and liked the young man.
State House had come up with a creative strategy to calm the turbulence at then only public universities in the country – University of Nairobi, Kenyatta and Moi Universities – where the students (the Gen Z of the day) had constituted themselves as the political opposition and taken on the government in those days of single-party state rule by law.
To tame the university students, the state, through co-option or coercion, dismembered the giant and radical single university student’s body, the Students Organisation of the Nairobi University (SONU), and sponsored the formation of regional-based university student unions.
Instead of SONU, we now had as many student’ bodies with parochial names like Uain-Gishu University Students Union, Nyeri University Students Association, etc.
The State went further ahead to arrange visits to State House or to the president's private homes by separate university groups, where a personal rapport was created between the President and university student leaders. To cement the rapport, students’ leaders would be picked to be in the presidential entourage during his many visits abroad back in the day.
Incidentally, as William Ruto warmed—or is it wormed?—his way into the inner sanctum of State power, so did another student leader by name Geoffrey Gachagua (now Rigathi Gachagua) find his way to State House as student leader from then Nyeri district. (The two chaps have a long shared history!)
Liking at first sight
It was during a visit to the Kabarak president’s residence by Uasin Gishu University Students’ Association when President Moi met young Ruto for the first time and developed an instant liking for him.
The President, as Ruto's college peer recalls, instantly liked the young man, more so because of his eloquence, choice of words and apparent deep religious convictions.
“The young Ruto had the zealotry of early disciples and spoke like John the Baptist in the wilderness,” jokes a college peer of the president, my friend journalist John Kamau.
Having attracted the attention of the President, the young man from Sugoi village literally crossed the Rubicon—whatever that is—never to look back again.
Henceforth, his name wouldn’t miss in the list of university students invited for a ‘cup of tea’ with the Head of State or to be in the presidential delegations abroad.
Blue-eyed boy
It is while taking his Masters’ degree course at the Chiromo campus of the University of Nairobi that the multi-party political regime came into being in 1992.
Feeling the heat and being cornered in the first multi-party election that year, KANU's top hierarchy came up with an inspired idea to form a youth movement that would take the country by storm. And in came the Youth for KANU 1992 (YK ’92). Young Ruto—he'd just marked his 26th birthday—was President Moi’s blue-eyed boy in YK ’92.
A year later, the movement’s treasurer, Sam Nyamweya told me that Ruto had been ‘planted’ in the YK ’92 by State House to checkmate on his less trusted colleagues at the top leadership of the YK ’92.
Kuji-panga
YK ’92 outlived its usefulness once KANU was back to power in the hotly contested election, and was dumped and forgotten in the usual political tradition of use-and-dump.
But while those in YK ’92 top leadership faded into oblivion, Ruto star went on shining.
By now he had made a name and a buddle for himself that he comfortably contested parliamentary election for the first time and ousted a veteran in the name of Rueben Chesire to be elected MP for Eldoret North constituency in 1997 election.
First-time luck
Going forward it was a Midas touch on every political project youthful Ruto ventured into.
Come 2002 President Moi was in his constitutionally-allowed last rap as president and was grooming young leaders to succeed him. His pick for the top seat was Uhuru Kenyatta to be deputised by Ruto.
President Moi began by re-engineering KANU leadership such that veteran old guards led by then Vice President George Saitoti were pushed aside in favour of youthful leaders. Uhuru was picked as the ruling party KANU presidential candidate and Ruto the second in the pecking order.
The 2002 election didn’t go as planned, but Ruto's star continued to shine. With time, he began emerging as the new Rift Valley kingpin as President Moi went to retirement.
Come 2007, there was no doubt Wiiliam Ruto was the new Rift Valley leader and strategically placed for a seat at the high table of the country’s top leadership.
The rest is history, as a series of first-time luck saw Ruto contest the the presidency for the first time in 2022 and win, a feat no other presidential candidate had accomplished since return of multi-party politics in 1992.
But lo and behold, Gen Z seems determined to break President Ruto’s cycle of first-time luck in politics. Gen Z has forced the president to throw away the Finance Bill and sack his entire cabinet.
But there is no letting up yet. Gen Z has told us to watch this Kenyan space. Kenyans are holding their breath to see who blinks first; Gen Z or Mr. President.
Postscript: I have stated in this column before that Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua is not a particularly nice man. Nothing personal, though. The DP is tough, rough, and talks too much, sometimes to his detriment. Like Napoleon, he also opens battles on too many fronts at the same time which, apparently, has got him staring at his political Waterloo.
That clearly came out during live interview by vernacular TV stations at his Karen official residence two weeks ago. One couldn’t help but sympathise with him as he gave a long litany of tribulations he has been subjected to by agents of the same government he fought so hard to put in power.
He cut the image of a rained-on chicken, a far cry from the swashbuckling man we saw in the 2022 election campaigns and in the early salad day of Kenya-Kwanza administration. So sorry for the self-proclaimed son of Mau Mau!