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NEWS & CURRENT AFFAIRS

The Nairobian

President Ruto on a lonely island shielded from unpalatable truth

Barrack Muluka

By Barrack Muluka | Feb 02, 2025

**President William Ruto** **interacts with sugarcane farmers during the launch of the issuance of bonuses at Mumias in Kakamega County on Jan 20, 2025.** [PCS]

If you listen to popular market conversations in Emanyulia, you begin to understand why Chinua Achebe said African leaders live on lonely islands. You especially understand why President William Ruto’s frantic efforts to court the Mulembe Nation’s vote ahead of 2027 could be futile.

But if Emanyulia is far, just walk in Nairobi’s informal spaces. Mingle with the underprivileged. Like those who walk to work in the morning, and back home in the evening. Listen in to their spirited and informed talk. You will confirm there are no more fools in Kenya, as Dr Ruto used to say in 2022. Their walk and talk is in rhyme and rhythm, in speed, spice and credence. They speak and walk with a sense of pained urgency. They yearn for change.

In the ended two weeks, their focus was on Ruto’s Western Kenya odyssey. Billed as a development tour, the visit avoided mention of the President’s development blueprint for the region. Villagers in Emanyulia and slum dwellers in Nairobi are talking about the treaty President Ruto signed with Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetang’ula in 2022. They talk of charters with the counties. A thousand kilometres of bitumen roads. Three brand new factories. Restoration of Pan Paper Mills, Mumias and Nzoia sugar factories. But, instead, they heard of sugarcane bonuses they say they are still waiting for. Westerners are wondering what the visit was about. The markets whose construction the President launched belong to county governments. The verbal assaults on Rigathi Gachagua are considered irrelevant diversions into conflicts between the two gentlemen. The launch of an electricity transformer is said to be baffling. The power company habitually brings a transformer to one place and takes away another. They have yet to understand the transformation the presidential transformer is supposed to make.

Amid all this, Dr Ruto’s regional courtiers and aides are assuring him that he has bagged Western Kenya. Achebe says in ‘The Trouble With Nigeria’ that loneliness and being routinely misled is the one price the African leader must pay. The trappings of protocol and the walls of grinning sycophants blockade him from reality. He operates under loads of lies and misrepresentations from the fawning self-seekers.

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Achebe has wondered, “When the African president sets out to see things for himself, what does he see? Highways cleared of lunatic drivers by even more lunatic presidential escorts; hitherto impassable tracks, freshly graded, and even watered to keep down the dust; buildings dripping with fresh paint.”

Wise leaders refuse to be fooled by political flatterers. They reject being hoodwinked with stage-managed tours in their own countries. They set out to find the truth for themselves. But is it also possible that some leaders prefer flattery and choreography to the truth? Martin Meredith, in The State of Africa, writes of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, on the eve of his downfall in 1966, “Surrounded by sycophants and praised daily, he became increasingly remote from the realities of the crises that Ghana faced.

“Nkrumah resented even the mildest criticism, refusing to believe that anything had gone wrong. He attributed every setback to imperialists and neo-colonialists, plotting against him. When ministers arrived bearing reports on economic difficulties, he was impatient and dismissive.”

In such circumstances, a leader does not even know his own palace, and often not even his own house. He knows nothing of what is happening right under his nose, “the intrigues and jealousies, the vicious whispering campaigns, the rumour mongering, the incompetence and greed, the bribery and corruption.” He is a man on a lonely island.

It matters not that he does not feel lonely. He is on his own. Peter Salasya of Mumias East dared to tell President Ruto that he is a lonely man. The President was pricked to the quick. He disdainfully dismissed the messenger of truth as “an ignorant political upstart.”

President Ruto enjoys the extravagant praise that urges the happy spirit towards self-immolation. The flattery comes from curious sources. His loudest admirers are ODM politicians, who until recently painted him in the colours of the devil incarnate. Together with them is a slew of politicos from Bungoma, and of course the renegade Cotu Secretary General, Francis Atwoli; Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi; and National Assembly Speaker, Moses Wetang’ula. Their flamboyant sycophancy blocks Ruto from the truth. It’s the path into a dark wood.

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke