Ruto's missteps are making Kenya a better place

First, it was a tragedy, then a farce. We don’t need a literature reading to see that President William Ruto and his Kenya Kwanza administration simply refuse to read the room. This is a terribly unpopular government, and it doesn’t need rich people to fund poor people to say this. If we were to stretch this thinking a little, it is not beyond reason that, in an election called today, Raila Odinga would probably win it with an absolute landslide if he wants the actual job.

But let’s go back to the tragical farce that is ongoing impeachment proceedings against Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, the “truthful mehn” who told us how they inherited “dilapidated public coffers” only to be told shortly thereafter about his freshly-minted multi-billion wealth. I have no dog in this apparent Ruto-Gachagua fight between what looks like two birds of a feather, but the new wealth accusations have the amateurish taint of Inspecter Clouseau’s pink panther.

The fact of the matter is our leaders steal. Kenya Kwanza was honest enough to proudly announce that corruption was not an important part of their agenda. And we voted for them. That was the tragedy. Now we are into a farce. Public participation in impeaching the Deputy President suddenly, and unsurprisingly, mutated into a referendum on the presidency. This is the basic trouble with bad thinking by bad leaders. It is always as desperate as it is disastrous. Look at the public participation form for this impeachment. You don’t support it? OK, shut up! You support it? OK, here is a lovely checklist of impeachment grounds you can tick off. This wasn’t an innocent form to fill, it was a psycho-social template for forced public consent.

Fortunately, Kenyans were smarter than the form. So it transmuted into a referendum on Ruto’s presidency. This is as it should be. Our 2010 Constitution decided, once and for all, that we were the masters of our destinies, and that the age of human demigods was gone for all time. And it’s more. It’s every day since young people stormed Parliament and lost life and limb on June 25. That’s the day our constitution truly came of age, the day that confirmed Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi’s astonishingly prescient warning that Finance Bill 2024 failure was a “no confidence” vote in government. What we didn’t reflect on was the 70 or so dead in 2023 cost of living protests, or the 60 or so dead in 2024. That’s our real impeachment story.

Which we may extend based on a great set of points that circulated this week on social media. A Cabinet Secretary (CS) unable to explain our universal healthcare programme. A Housing CS who can’t elucidate our affordable housing program. A Transport CS who was the Energy CS who isn’t explaining Adani on both sides. Hey, an Interior CS with a supposed human rights background who explains neither abductions nor killings. And this is just the current stuff.

Because we could also go back to poisoned edible oils and fake fertiliser as more important public participation questions than a deputy’s impeachment. Humanity, not human being, questions.

Tragedy, then farce. My outlier view is the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) is correct. It is a pro-poor, pro-markets agenda that lifts the poor and fights our crony capital. The immediate losers are our middle class “bubble,” in favour of our “kadogo” economy. Only problem is the “casino economy” at the top still rules, hence our overall “bandit economy.” At the core of this would be three strategies – private sector development, public sector overhaul and public enterprise enterprise reform and restructuring. The basic challenge here, as I have said repeatedly before, is our leadership suffers a rudely existential battle of wits between the new of daring policy adventure (as BETA proposes) and the old of traditional primitive accumulation.

In simpler English, our leadership cannot transform the economy if they are scoffing it up. In the Book of Revelations, we would call this the Fourth Horseman of Corruption. The very same terrible thing we voted this administration in knowing that they wouldn’t even bother to address.

If we were to have a proper impeachment agenda, it might start with the economy. But this administration does not, or cannot, effect structural economic reform, the essence of BETA. They also don’t have the right timelines – already at least a year behind in a 15-year agenda. And they still operate on the falsely untidy premise that the government is the same as the economy.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s take the impeachment agenda to government. The one point that fails Gachagua is he was given two massive portfolios by his boss. Devolution and Intergovernmental Relations (with Parliament and the Judiciary). But he basically went villager. Arguably, this was probably not his to control. Because his boss, Ruto, should have done better. Actually, let’s be positive here and say that Ruto needs to do much better.

He is obviously better acting proactively than reactively. But he is in very clear and present impeachment territory. Counterintuitively, he is in a position of strength. Without the primitive accumulation, he can revitalise his economic agenda. With better delegation of authority, he can boost his government agenda. In the fullness of time, he may eventually come to terms with the governance and rule of law mandate that the Constitution demands of him. If we thought about this carefully, he has the opportunity to create not just a social contract but a societal vision for all of Kenya.

Ruto might start by seeing that this impeachment motion against his deputy is a waste of time. Our and his. He has better things to do. The alternative is endless, careless diversion from the desperate economic and fiscal situation that pretty much keeps our country on permanent edge.

To repeat, tragedy, then a farce. We called it out pretty early on as hubris, incompetence, lies and looting (HILL). We said the smart approach might have centred on, say, digital and green, like the clever part of the rest of the world. In seeking a leader who looked forwards, not backwards. In the old days, the world watched. These days, Kenyans act. The signifying irony in all of this untidy chaos is that Ruto’s continual leadership missteps are actually making our country better!

- Kabaara is a management consultant