Love him or loathe him, Ruto isn’t going anywhere 

There is a worrying lack of depth in the way many young Kenyans, especially Gen Z, engage with politics. For Gen Z, everything is about “vibes”.

Everything is “down with the system”. But when you strip away the slogans and trending hashtags, what’s left is often an alarming ignorance of how power actually works.  

Unknown to them, politics isn’t child’s play. Politics isn’t content creation.

Politics is a vast field of social sciences that great thinkers like Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and others worked to untangle. 

For those familiar with political gymnastics, the chants, activism, and loud rants on blogs and social media don’t translate into victory.

They’re merely forms of activism. It’s well established that activism can help shape the conversation, but it cannot win votes on its own. 

Consider the recent outrage when Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi labelled Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore a dictator.

The backlash was loud, emotional, and misguided. Young Kenyans, captivated by Traore’s anti-Western speeches and viral TikTok clips, rushed to defend him as though he were a revolutionary messiah.

In truth, Prime CS Mudavadi was correct. 

Traore seized power through a military coup. He suspended the constitution, dissolved democratic institutions, and put soldiers in charge of government ministries.

That is not a new model for African leadership; it’s textbook dictatorship. It’s seizing power through unorthodox means.

No parliament. No judicial checks. No elections. No accountability. Just guns and a uniform. A revolution devoid of laws. 

Now, compare this to Kenya, where President Ruto, love him or loathe him, is an elected leader operating within a constitutional framework.

When he made those “shoot the legs” and “jail the thugs” remarks during protests, they sparked justified outrage.

But the remarks were made within a system that still has functioning courts, parliament, an independent media, and an electoral commission.

You may not like his tone, or protest his policies, or even dislike his work ethic—but you still have legal avenues to push back.

That’s not how dictatorship works. 

Let’s be clear: if President Ruto were to wake up tomorrow, dissolve the judiciary, hand over power to the military, shut down the press, and start ruling by decree—that would be dictatorship.

Until then, calling him a dictator while romanticising a military junta in Burkina Faso is not only lazy but intellectually bankrupt—ideologies propagated by naive TikTokers, sadists, anarchists, and unpatriotic leaders. 

The current obsession with revolutionary aesthetics over actual systems is dangerous for a democratic country. Passion is not a substitute for knowledge.

Screaming “power to the people” means nothing if you can’t define the power structures you’re claiming to oppose. 

Do you want to hold leaders accountable? Good. But do it with facts, not fantasy and the fallacy of sensationalising trivial issues.  

The writer is a Communication Lecturer and Researcher 

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