Ruto's two political mistakes, two wildfires

Linda Mwananchi is an existential threat to President William Ruto’s dream of a second term in office. It is circling him like an unstoppable wild forest fire that could merge with other fires to eat him up. Recognising this, President Ruto has responded by characterising the entire opposition as an existential threat to Kenya.

If anyone should worry about this inferno, it is President Ruto and his political cronies, and not the Kenyan nation. It is understandable, however, that when people are in power, they sometimes mistake themselves for the country. They think that they are the state and its institutions. In their narrow interpretation, an existential threat to them becomes a threat to the country, hence the classification of President Ruto’s personal anxiety over the massing of opposition troops as a threat to the country.

When forests burn, they often astonish us. The first reports appear almost routine. A blaze has broken out somewhere. Firefighters are dispatched. Aircraft circle overhead. Yet, as ongoing fires in Southern Europe have shown these past few weeks, the inferno soon gets out of control. It threatens our very existence.

Political history often unfolds the same way. Kenya finds itself captivated by what legacy media has christened “the Sifuna Storm.” Last week, the phrase appeared on the front page of the two leading weekend papers on the same day, in the same idiom. Such newsroom convergence is rarely accidental. Editors are keen readers of civic activities and the public mood. They accurately read things that are moving beneath the regular rime and rhythm of politics. They recognise the tectonic shifts that define turning points in history. They call them by their right names. 

When two leading weekend papers lead with the “Sifuna storm”, therefore, civic activities have gone beyond the ordinary vocabulary of political competitions and rivalries. Something momentous is happening, and it is more than a political storm. It is a wild political forest fire that is nearing the momentum of flying on its own energy.

Like all forest fires, Linda Mwananchi is travelling on the fuel of accumulated grievances that Edwin Sifuna and his team are articulating with remarkable ease. It is the fuel of economic hardship, unemployment, grand corruption, inequality, perceptions of injustice, heavy taxation and wastage of public funds by people in high public office. 

Long months of the drought of difficult living conditions under the Kenya Kwanza regime have generated just the right social energy for Linda Mwananchi. The ODM splinter movement is steadily assuming the character of an inferno that could prove impossible to stop. Even as caution is exercised not to run ahead of history with rushed conclusions, the wild forest fire triangle is only too visible. Fuel, oxygen, and heat.

Apart from fuel, the forest fire rides on heat and oxygen. And Kenya under William Ruto is a furnace of political heat, generated mostly by Ruto himself. Furious rhetoric is Kenya’s daily serving, both from the government and the opposition. President Ruto and his political acolytes are adept at generating high-voltage heat through dismissive rhetoric and, often, insolent language. They describe opposition leaders in appalling terms. They issue threats and display arrogance. Whether they know it or not, they have, over the past four years, supplied the political passion that Linda Mwananchi is thriving on.

Crowning it all is the oxygen of public conversation. Kenyans live on a rich diet of political discourse in social media, vernacular radio, in churches, markets, public transport, and in countless other spaces. Political sentiment is floated, tested and amplified. And it is favouring anti-government mobilizers like Team Sifuna.

One of the likely early casualties of the rise of Linda Mwananchi is the traditional political kingpins of Western Kenya, notably Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi; National Assembly Speaker, Moses Wetang’ula; and Co-operatives CS, Wycliffe Oparanya. The three are close associates of President Ruto. They are seen in Western Kenya as the face of what has gone wrong in the region, and in the country too.

Both Sifuna and impeached former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua have exploited the extravagant, unfulfilled election promises that Ruto, Mudavadi and Wetang’ula made in Western Kenya in 2022. They are shocked that the two are bringing back Ruto on new slates of promises, ahead of next year’s poll.

What happened to the old promises? This has been the one-million-dollar question. Why are you piling new promises upon old promises? But shrewd political craftsman that President Ruto is, he is deftly trying to make the new promises read like catalogues of delivered goods.

It is the self-same old chorus of bitumen roads, revival of collapsed companies, youth empowerment and employment programmes, and sundry recycled political promises. These are topped up by narratives about uniting Kenyans, and “fighting tribal leaders” from an unnamed tribe.

The promises are crowned with a bait that President Ruto and the Kalenjin community will support a Luhya leader to ascend to the presidency in 2032, when his presumed second term ends. The bait on the Ruto hook is a choice between Mudavadi and Wetang’ula. The mammoth Linda Mwananchi rallies in Kitale and Bungoma, however, cast the two leaders in the mould of exhausted oldies, who have had their time in the arena and need to pave the way for a new generation.

The emerging idiom in Western Kenya sees Mudavadi and Wetang’ula in the imagery of dead-in-the-shell chicken eggs. The dominant Luhya community in the region has a dictum about the futility of keeping germ chicken eggs in the incubator beyond 21 days. At every election for three decades now, Mudavadi and Wetang’ula have been billed to hatch into presidents. But like the proverbial Ethelred the Unready, they are always a bridge too far. The region is overwhelmed with a Mudavadi-Wetang'ula fatigue. Sifuna and other millennials are a breath of fresh air in Mudavadi-Wetang’ula-suffocated Western Kenya.

In this context, the Mulembe nation is finding organic unity of purpose around Sifuna. It is enthralled by his youthful zest, clarity of mind, and courage to take the redoubtable Ruto head-on, where the legacy politicians from the region have chosen the path of sycophancy and political toadying. Mudavadi, particularly, caused consternation in the region when, last year, he folded his Amani National Congress (ANC) Party in a show of fawning loyalty to President Ruto.

Wetang’ula enjoys a slight edge over Mudavadi, for the courage to refuse to fold the Ford Kenya Party, a reality that President Ruto has reluctantly accepted to live with. With the two leaders under wraps, however, Ruto believed that he had the entire Western vote in the bag. This belief has made him increasingly disdainful towards the Mt. Kenya community, believing that he would use Western voters to replace the massive popularity that he has lost in the Mountain, since the impeachment of Gachagua.

That was until Edwin Sifuna and Linda Mwananchi happened. Ruto is no longer at ease. State House insiders talk of a restless President who is nervous about the Presidency seeming to slowly but surely slip through his fingers. His frustration finds vent in public displays of anger and unmeasured, insolent language against opposition leaders. He impatiently and moodily characterises them as  “stupid”, “brainless”, and “without any agenda for Kenya.” With the rise of Sifuna and Linda Mwananchi, the President has now come up with the mantra of the opposition as an existential threat to Kenya.

This is possibly a curtain-raiser to the next wave of clampdown that Ruto could be plotting against the opposition, and especially the soaring popularity of Linda Mwananchi. For Linda Mwananchi is the opposition trump card that nobody thought about two years ago. Then, the only known existential threat to President Ruto was the Zoomers generation; generically referred to as Gen-Z. These youth caught Ruto completely unawares, with their methodical street protests in diverse parts of the country in June 2024, when they protested against the Finance Bill.

Ruto thought that he had neutered the opposition when, in October of that year, he drafted Raila Odinga and ODM into an ambiguous broad-based government arrangement. This was a timely pre-emptive move in that season, for ODM under Raila stood the foremost chance to organise and mobilise the Gen-Zs, who had arrived proclaiming that they were leaderless, party-less, and tribeless. Apart from absorbing Raila and a cocktail of ODM bigwigs, some Gen-Z vocal voices were also netted, an affirmation that these absorptions were pre-emptive.

Then Ruto made two fatal political mistakes. Believing himself to be the ultimate political craftsman in the country, he sparked off two political wild forest fires, one in the Mt. Kenya region, and the other around Sifuna. If he thought that the fires would burn Gachagua, whom he impeached in October 2024, and Sifuna – who was becoming a thorn in his flesh by refusing to recognise the broad-based deal- the two political forest fires are closing the ranks around him. They could consume him in August next year.

Looked at through different lenses, President Ruto is the proverbial individual who cast two giant electric eels into the waters, thinking that he was destroying them. He did not know that he was throwing the fish into their place of comfort. The eels are now delivering powerful electric jolts that are numbing his predatory skills, threatening his very political survival. The timing was absolutely wrong.

Ruto overlooked the reality that leadership of massive populations often arises out of a meeting between individuals and historical circumstances. Sifuna does not appear to have set out to launch a mass movement. He only resisted a political proposition by Ruto and Raila. He did not agree that ODM should work with Ruto and UDA in the broad-based affair. But it was also at a time when Raila’s choice to work with Ruto had left a void in the political opposition space.

Yet, none of the individuals left behind in Azimio could fit into Raila’s giant political shoes. They did not have the moral liberational history or voice to give them a legitimate claim of taking over from Raila, now that he was working with Ruto. Where he naturally rose to the occasion as the leader, the other Azimio principals could only be faithful followers. The opposition space had a hiatus; a gap yawning for leadership.

At the same time, the Gen-Z grievance galore continued to resonate widely with the rest of the population. Yet Gen-Zs could not see any leader they could trust. They characterised opposition chiefs as systems people, who were only where they were on account of relative deprivation.

Kenya’s official population pyramid shows that persons aged 18 to 35 account for about 75 per cent of the voting potential. These youth yearn for a leader from within their ranks. But they also yearn for someone who comes with clean hands. No blood on his hands, not corrupt, visionary, courageous and focused.

Could Edwin Sifuna be that individual? Only time will tell. For now, lessons from history teach us that individuals like Sifuna become larger than themselves because they embody sentiments that have been searching for expression. Sifuna and Linda Mwananchi may not be the creators of the sentiment running through a population that is unhappy with Ruto and the Kenya Kwanza leadership. Yet, are they perhaps the sentiment’s clearest voice? They may not be the fire as such, but they are at the very least its clearest and most visible flame.

The establishment will be desperately fighting to put out this fire, for it is an existential threat to them. Therein reside bundles of acid tests that Sifuna and Linda Mwananchi must take and pass. We unbundle them in the next part of this focus.