After selling off nation's assets on the hoof, let's sell passports for profit

I’m starting to look at Prezzo Bill Ruto with new respect. His administration has sold the Kenya Pipeline Corporation to Ugandans. Brits will soon have the levers that control Safaricom, which, incidentally, runs M-Pesa, our virtual economic backbone, on Chinese technology.

If that sounds like the State is being doled out to external actors, Prezzo Ruto is hell-bent on creating a vaunted National Infrastructure Fund, the miracle vehicle that would be used to mobilise resources for development.

Wait, the Fund is neither national nor public-owned; it is a private entity created to control public resources. Yes, that’s correct. Public money run by private citizens! As if that’s not enough, the Kenyan passport is being issued to charlatans of all shades, including warlords wanted for crimes against humanity!

Yet, all these scams burst in the open violently, before fizzling out without so much as lifting a strand of hair in Prezzo Bill Ruto’s receding hairline. He is immune to it all.

Some detractors think this is a reflection of Kenyans’ desensitisation to scandal and sleaze; we’ve had it so rough with UDA, people don’t care anymore. And in the coming week, we’re guaranteed that a fresh scandal will explode, before slithering into nothingness. As the Kisii Senator Richard Onyonka said this week, this is a government of thieves, by thieves, for thieves.

I wouldn’t be that disrespectful because I was raised to defer to authority. And there were many Kenyans, including Prezzo Ruto and his erstwhile Deputy, Rigathi Gachagua aka Riggy G, who purported, before their dramatic falling out, who posit that it’s Kenyans who prayed them into power!

Let me concede I used to think those were fictive constructs before I met an Uber driver who confessed to having retreated to a weekend of fasting and praying for the duo’s election in 2022. And now she’s been praying with equal zeal for their ouster! I told her to start using her head before offering prayers.

But I think a different explanation obtains. After three years in charge, Kenyans are finally coming to grips with the complexity of Prezzo Ruto’s “pan-African” credentials. It is not something Kenyans took seriously, besides coining that catchy rhyme, “when he’s not flying, he’s lying,” at a time Prezzo Ruto flew around the world as though he had a deadline to complete his round-the-world forays in 90 days.

Then he had styled himself as the new “African statesman,” even sitting at a banquet in Washington, where he was photographed grinning at Joe Biden’s desk at the White House, eliciting slurs from those who reminded him that that particular house had been built by African slaves.

Before long, Prezzo Ruto was signing away our troops to join in the American misadventure in Haiti, a project that has since ground to a halt. Then, it was suggested that the reason for our participation, other than being Washington’s factotum, was that we, as Africans, were coming to the rescue of fellow black brethren.

The issuance of Kenyan passports to foreign nationals of dubious distinction should be seen in the same vein. Unlike the Mwai Kibaki administration that extended the privilege of the Kenyan passport to Armenian crooks, the Ruto administration has been extending our passports strictly to African crooks.

So far, this favour has been extended to Sudanese and Zimbabwean vagabonds and criminals. Still, there has been a modicum of honour: Religious and social outlooks of those charlatans have not come in the way. Muslims and Christians are well represented.

In any case, the social class and professional considerations have been nullified. The Zimbabwean is a street hustler, while the Sudanese chap is a military veteran, reportedly experienced in pillaging black villages in the Sudan, where women and children are routinely raped.

I think it’d make a lot of sense to offer a select number of passports to foreign nationals who can afford it, now that we have almost depleted national assets for future sale, and promote Pan-African ideals of Prezzo Ruto. It’s a win-win situation.