Nostalgia for past can’t save spirit-killing regime
By Hansen Owilla, March 31, 2025#RutoMustGo reminds us of the last days of Arsene Wenger at the Emirates Stadium and the #WengerOut banners that fans all over the world would unfurl at any major opportune public gathering.
You see, for some of us who support Arsenal and are in the EPL craze because of the fantastic and entertaining brand of football Arsenal played in the early 2000s, pretty much from when Wenger joined in 1996, we clung to the belief that he would build a title-winning team.
We had those near triumphs, with the most painful being 2016 when Ngolo Kante and Jamie Vardy-inspired Leicester City pipped us despite Arsenal beating them home and away. That nostalgic feeling had endeared some of us to Wenger and we didn’t want him to leave without a final hurrah. For those who believed in him, #WengerOut was fairly painful to see, and I guess #RutoMustGo must be hitting the people around power and the fans who are still living in the romanticised past with lots of pain.
This group of optimistic fans hopes, probably hopelessly, that the President would do something out of this world to transform his regime’s fortune. The ones who’ve given up, the disenchanted to the core, are probably the loudest with #RutoMustGo. They definitely voted for the regime but close to three years down the lane they are caught in the high seas, they are thirsty but though surrounded by plenty of water they got no water to drink. They cannot drink salty water, and the shore is too far. They’ve got to get to the shore, and they can’t do that fast enough.
To these folks, there is no way out, save for #RutoMustGo. The cosmetic rallies in Nairobi and the attendant mobilisation power of force does not faze this group. They probably are looking at the President’s fear of visiting the Mt Kenya region, his bastion in the last election, as a sign that the centre cannot hold, and the end is nigh. They know that it might happen because of the economic gains a few politicians are likely to reap, and they know even if it ends badly, the narrative that will come out from both the regime supporters and the other side will be curated and deceptive.
But still there is the other group of this regime’s supporters who’ve got some glimmer of hope that the President, who rose from the ashes of poverty, will change the fortunes of the poor. This brand of Kenyans, like those of us Arsenal fans who believed that Wenger was going to change the fortunes of Arsenal and nip the #WengerOut nonsense in the bud, are special. This group does not believe in the razzmatazz of public optics and the dialectics of #RutoMustGo. They see some of these efforts to please Mwananchi at rallies as a waste of time. They have this eerie belief that somehow, just like changing the fortunes in the field would have saved Wenger, this regime can save itself by addressing the plight of the suffering Kenyans.
Well, this special group of Kenyans still believe that we will see small-scale farmers, traders, watu wa chini and all of us showcasing the Kenya Kwanza regime-inspired success that we are seeing in a documentary doing the rounds, the success of the President as a large-scale farmer. This group imagines that our education system will take off after nine years of CBC, SHA/SHIF will work and most importantly that the new higher education funding model vehemently pushed by this regime, as disruptive and equitably consequential as it is, will work. That political talk will make way for a showcase of JSS infrastructure that we need more than the affordable houses built in villages where no one wants a highrise building.
You see, this group holds on to the nostalgic past of the Eldoret North MP and the DP in 2013 to 2017 who had a track record of solid performance. Even the ODM diehards who have a soft spot for the President remember his time as an ODM supremo who moved things and delivered for the party.
Well, if everything goes in the direction that we see, even this group of optimists will start singing #RutoMustGo
— The writer is a media studies Researcher