Like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, 'saviour' Ruto has disappointed

There appears to be a perpetual pattern in which people who start as idealists when fighting for change actually change to something else once they attain power. Some are simply power hungry and are good students of Machiavelli’s Prince or Kautilya’s Athashastra on how to acquire and keep power. To Kautilya and Machiavelli, who lived over 1,100 years apart, grabbing and maintaining power precedes issues of morality.  

What distinguishes idealists from the power hungry is their willingness to suffer for those ideals. The power hungry, in contrast, make other people suffer for them to get or keep power. Revolutionaries generally tend to be idealists at the beginning and then deteriorate into believing that they are so right that everyone else is wrong. They then kill people while searching for ‘counter revolutionaries’. It was the case in the French Revolution which ended with the Jacobin terrorism trying to force conformity on everyone.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks imposed ‘dictatorship of the proletariats’ with Lenin controlling the ‘commanding heights’ of the revolution. Revolutionary Mao captured China and then promoted the idea of perpetual revolution to remind people of what it was to be ‘revolutionary’ and people died. These revolutions started with high ideals only to end with many people dead in countering counter-revolutionaries.

In colonised Africa, anti-colonialists were idealists for they were not sure they would live to see the end of colonialism. They fought for beliefs that life will be better for all if only the existing racially based order could disappear. In 1945, for instance, the African elite met at Manchester to plot the end of racially-based colonialism, using any means necessary even if it destroyed the world. They did it through mass movements and agitation in West Africa, particularly the Gold Coast, which produced Kwame Nkrumah with his Osagyefo or saviour image.

Anti-colonial wars

By the time he was overthrown in Ghana in 1966, Nkrumah’s image had been transformed from that of a ‘saviour’ into that of a dictator or what Ali Mazrui termed a Leninist-Czar. They also fought using anti-colonial wars such as the Mau Mau in Kenya against British colonialists and the Algerian War in Algeria against the colonising French.

In Kenya, it was Jomo Kenyatta who carried the saviour image, as the ‘Moses’ liberating Kenyans from colonial governance. He did not die in jail as it was feared. He instead lived to lead Kenya into independence and then appeared to change from being an inspiring ‘revolutionary’ into a disappointing counter-revolutionary coddling the former colonialist. Many people wondered what had happened to the 'Burning Spear'. 

While Nkrumah and Kenyatta, both participants at the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress, gained fame as anti-colonialists, there arose post-colonial saviours who pulled their countries from deep miseries.

In Uganda, after prolonged Milton Obote and Idi Amin generated chaos, there emerged Yoweri Kaguta Museveni as the saviour. In neighbouring Rwanda, Paul Kagame, a one-time Museveni colleague, emerged as the saviour of chaotic Rwanda because he reportedly rescued the country from the 1994 genocide.

Although both Museveni and Kagame have held office for over 30 years each, they continue to be entrenched because they perpetuate the saviour image and people have not forgotten the chaotic days.

The 2024 Gen Z uprising showed that Kenya is collapsing due to organised incompetence which generates a sense of hopelessness. There is need for national orientation to stop the sliding and sinking deep into misery.

William Ruto, the self-appointed ‘saviour’, started with much public goodwill but then lost credibility for seemingly driving Kenya into poverty and dependency. Subsequently, Kenya needs ‘leadership’ that can inspire it out of orchestrated underdevelopment. Since hardly any current candidate in the field fits the bill, who will that be, and when?