Ruto morphing into a national security threat

I have slowly started to regard my President, His Excellency Dr. William Ruto, as a threat to Kenya’s national security.

I spent the last days of 2024 in my Kabras place of birth in Kakamega county. For more than a week that I was upcountry, I did not meet anyone who spoke positively of my President or his Government. All the opinions were in the negative, bitter and rueful.

Those who voted for Kenya Kwanza now loudly regret why they did so while those who did not proudly justify their decision. It took me a short time to realise that President Ruto and his Government have lost the confidence and trust of the people at the grassroots.

Two years ago, at the burial service of Field Marshall Mukami Kimathi, the widow of revered freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi, President Ruto – in a direct jab at his then political rival and opponent in the 2022 election, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga who was present – told the world that he is a good student of the late President Mwai Kibaki. Ruto told Raila that whereas the former premier was good in narrating history, he himself was good in economics and was steadily fixing the country’s financial books Kibaki-style.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Ruto has demonstrated that he is the opposite of everything that Kibaki was as President. One does not need any pollster to be informed that Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza administration is driving the country in the worst directions ever since independence in 1963. So far, Ruto’s stewardship of Kenya has so far been a journey of disappointment after another.

Unlike Kibaki, Ruto is extremely intolerant, arrogant, allergic to honesty, frowns at democracy, counsel, constitutionalism and is seemingly at home in the company of crude, cruel and rude persons whose lips cherish vitriol, insolence, rancour and ethnic bigotry.

Ruto ascended to the Presidency on September 13, 2023, with pomp, respect and goodwill. However, within a only two years all those attributes have evaporated and Ruto has been exposed as a lonely and desperate leader now hanging on straws as he seeks for Raila and immediate former President Uhuru Kenyatta to keep him in a survival mode until 2027.

A Governor friend of mine who served in the Kibaki regime in a senior position once told me that the reason why the late President succeeded was because he focused on what he had promised in his manifesto and never allowed himself to be distracted by the political functionaries and other busybodies in his court.

The Governor told me, whenever the former President attracted negative media publicity and was advised by his handlers to respond, he would tell them: “Hakuna haja: si kesho wataandika kwa watu wengine. Kwani wataandika mimi tu kila siku? Wachana na hiyo.” (Leave them alone, tomorrow they will write about somebody else)

With that style, Kibaki succeeded in taming criticism. Unlike Kibaki, Ruto wants to respond to every critic and even get them – most of them young persons – hunted  down like rats. That approach has left Ruto to be viewed in the lenses repression and unpopularity among the youths.

While during Kibaki’s time Kenyans were eager to hear from the Government spokesperson Dr. Alfred Mutua (now Minister for Labour) on matters regarding Government programmes and achievements, in Ruto’s administration Kenyans wait to hear what Kapseret MP Oscar Kipchumba Sudi (not Government spokesperson Dr. Isaac Mwaura) is saying to get a clue of where the Kenya Kwanza Government is headed and what it plans to enforce.

These kinds on seamy scenarios are what leave me to conclude that Ruto is increasingly turning into Kenya’s most dangerous national security threat.  Here is why.I took note that Ruto was present in Ghana last week during the inauguration of recently elected President of the west African nation, John Dramani Mahama.

At that event, the youthful President of  Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traore stole the show when he arrived to also grace the momentous occasion.

Captain Traore and his counterparts in Mali and Guinea – Assimi Goita and General Mamady Doumbouya respectively – are military officers who seized power around the same time that Ruto rode to the throne.

The three leaders have become darlings of the youthful population on the African continent, despite the fact that they govern their countries as juntas and not as elected presidents.

I have a keen interest in the Ruto Presidency. First because Kenya’s fifth President is my age-mate (I was born in April and he in December).

But more importantly, President Ruto is the most educated of the Heads of State in independent Kenya. He holds a PhD, a tier above Kibaki who has a Master’s degree.

It is leaders like our own President William Ruto who make people like Traore, Goita and  Doumbouya attractive to the young people on the African continent.

When an educated, exposed and eloquent leader like Ruto throws all tenets of democracy and good governance, they give room for discussions on the continent that draw  comparisons between a wayward authoritarian elected Head of State and a uniformed power-grabber from the disciplined forces.

It is at this point that Ruto surely becomes a national security threat. President William Ruto does not want to hear any other voice in Kenya save for his own.

President Ruto keeps quiet when his court jesters promise dire consequences to his critics, hurl unprintable epithets at Kenyan women and youths, brazenly rig elections by circumventing democracy with a view to prolonging his tenure in office.

In the process, Ruto has been distracted. Hi’s henchmen have diverted his attention from his election manifesto and instead concentrate on lamentations on their safety and that of their children.

Today, what were initially Ruto’s pet development projects such as universal health coverage, affordable housing and Hustler Fund are no longer the subjects the Kenyan electorate discuss.

Instead, they deliberate about their immediate safety, abductions of their expressive Kenyan youths, electricity outages, the painful and confusing education system and the meaninglessness of the country’s electoral process.

Kenya is not in a safe place now.  Through his acts of ommission and commission, Ruto is brewing dicconent in the country. A rebellion of sorts. We are not sitting pretty. The year 2025 and the next are obviously not going to be a good.