2027 conspiracy: Will national security be sacrificed as Ruto faces North in vote hunt?

As President William Ruto ran across North Eastern Kenya in the ended week, questions lingered on population issues, altruism, the 2027 presidential election, and Somali nationalism in Kenya, and in the greater Somali community in Eastern Africa.

Was the tour about redressing historical injustices against the Somali of Kenya or did it seek to open the floodgates for foreigners to shoo up Ruto’s electoral numbers? Was it Dr Ruto’s answer to a wider Kenyan nation where he is steadily becoming unpopular? Why was the President often erupting into violent language?

Ruto was so visibly nettlesome. He occasionally veered off message to engage in bandy words with defiant youth, and to boast about his supposedly superior education. 

Where will Ruto’s love affair with the Kenyan North leave security in the region and the country? Where does it leave the traditional negative association of the region with the dreaded Al-Shabaab terrorists? What of the reputation of the Kenyan passport, that will now be more freely available? And where does it leave global perceptions of the war against terror and Kenya’s input? Significantly, where will it leave Somali nationalism that has rocked the region over the decades?

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READ: The 2027 conspiracy: Why Northern Kenya is crucial to Ruto's 2027 re-election bid

That Kenya’s 2027 race has begun is no longer in doubt. Rattled by the fact that this August his government will be three years, Dr Ruto has flown into early campaigns. He has all the barrels blazing.

According to inside sources, there is concern that, of the elaborate 2022 campaign promissory notes, little has been accomplished. A lot of time went to incessant foreign travels and political optics.

Unfortunately, the optics have not matured into tangible development, beyond macroeconomic statistics that do not signify much to the individual Kenyan. Erratic fiscal adventures in taxation and budgeting have generated agony and unhappiness that is worrying the grandees of the Ruto regime.

Fear abounds that, put together with wider public disaffection against President Ruto by Kenyan youth and the hustlers, this absence of tangible development and the prevailing harsh living conditions could cost the President his much desired second term.

Ruto’s focus is, accordingly, now spiritedly on securing 2027. It is behind this background that last week’s charm offensive in North Eastern Kenya was conducted. The visit threw to the four winds all historical security and ethnic nationalism challenges that have dogged North Eastern Kenya since colonial times.

There is fear that the 2027 presidential focus could lift the lid on Pandora issues that have simmered beneath the surface since 1967 when the irredentist Kenyan Somali Shifta movement was defeated. Shifta was about the Somali fighting to break away from Kenya, to become a part of the Republic of Somalia, between 1963 and 1967.

Could the Ruto re-election fever goad the President to ignore crucial issues that could jeopardise security not just in Kenya, but in the entire region and elsewhere in the world? What quality of advice is he getting as he goes out on the campaign rampage?

President Ruto has set up a veiled presidential campaign secretariat in the form of the Government Delivery Unit (GDU), under the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of President Eliud Owalo.  Mr Owalo is a former Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digital Economy.

Removed during the Gen-Z uprising in July last year as a part of an entire Cabinet purge, he was recalled in August to coordinate the 2027 Ruto re-election effort. To mask the effort while obviating the use of private resources, the very heart of the heart of Presidency was selected as the place to host the team.

Fully equipped with campaign-style presidential personnel, and armed with enabling paraphernalia and accoutrements, Owalo’s below-the-radar outfit has the brief to deliver a second term for President Ruto. It is expected to develop a campaign brag sheet that highlights Ruto’s successes, both real and imagined.

The team is backed up by an off-site statistics squad, led by Transport and Communications CS Davis Chirchir. There is also a scientific data management and leadership guru, Alloysius Obare. Together, they are crunching what are believed to be precise target numbers of votes to be mined in each part of the country, and how they should be bagged. They have identified regional soft-underbellies, as well as points of least resistance, for campaign entry.  

Together with a supporting team of media voices, whose role is to drive public opinion, they have identified specific issues to be addressed and how the messages should be packaged. The media effort is coordinated by a journalist of repute and other communications professionals, all of whom were engaged last month. This team is in turn backed up by the President’s media gurus in the State House. The chosen strategic thrust is to make whirlwind forays into regions where the Head of State is least expected to be resisted.

Armed with a promissory bounty no matter what value, the President should use the opportunity to demonstrate that his government is working, it is inclusive and it, especially, has a soft spot for the people of the region being visited. If possible, he should demonstrate that the kind of cargo he has brought is landing here for the very first time.

READ: If things remain constant, Ruto will win resoundingly in 2027

It is behind this background that President Ruto landed in Mandera this week with soundbites that were music in the ears of Kenyans in the Northeast. He arrived fully loaded with good tidings. The government is going to vaccinate their animals so that their meat will be attractive to lucrative overseas markets. He has waived vetting of the people from this region for national identification cards and Kenyan passports. He has also opened a regional registration office in Garissa, for ease of national registration and issuance of passports.

The registration exercise, in particular, has been a huge score for the President. It is easily the trump card of the ended mission to the North.

“We must end this discrimination (against the Somali),” Ruto told ecstatic crowds in the north-eastern counties, pandering to the intrinsic sense of Somali nationhood.

“If we can allow refugees to become Kenyan citizens, why should we subject Kenyans to vetting before we can register them?” he quipped, to deafening applause.

Writing in the Press on Friday, Billow Kerrow, a former senator for Mandera County, was at once upbeat and cross.

“Vetting of Somalis for IDs is discriminatory and must end,” he said.

Mr Kerrow alleged that thousands of residents in the region do not have Kenyan national identification cards. This is regardless of where they live or where they were born in the country. Provided that they are of Somali ancestry, they must be vetted by the National Intelligence Services working together with provincial administration in their parental place of origin.

It is said to be an arduous assignment that often ends only in frustration and despair. “Students lose out on colleges and jobs, often from lack of this document,” Kerrow says.

President Ruto has, accordingly, scored big. But, conversely, could this victory return to haunt him and the country? Has he placed popularity and electoral hope before logic? Has he put faith above reason, and personal ambition over greater national interest? And does the President have the authority to overturn existing statutory and regulatory arrangements on Kenyan citizenship? Has Ruto jumped the gun of making someone a Kenyan citizen? Is the relaxing of national registration for the Somali a factor of genuine concern against discrimination or is it an aspect of electoral gerrymandering?

That Dr Ruto is courting Somali votes is not in doubt. Once again, he visited the subject of what he sees as his assured landslide victory in the 2027 presidential race. He could not help thumping his chest, even as he advised his competitors to refrain from early campaigns for 2027.

But it was Garissa County Woman MP Amina Udgoon Siyad who took the point home. “We have got everything we ever wanted from you. You have opened up the livestock market for us and for Somalia. We want them to also bring their livestock here. The people of Northern Kenya are behind you. We will translate the song the Mountain used to sing for you. You cannot serve only one term,” she said.

Yet the possibilities seem to go beyond opening up opportunities for Kenyan Somali. The porous borders provide a good opportunity for non-Kenyan Somali people to acquire Kenyan citizenship without following the regulations, as laid out in the Citizenship and Immigration Act (No. 12 of 2011). Part III of the Act lays out a raft of conditions that a non-Kenyan must satisfy before being eligible for registration as a Kenyan citizen.

Lifting of vetting as President Ruto says he has done now makes it possible for any non-Kenyan Somali to become Kenyan by a simple stroke of the pen on a sheet of paper. How does the President open up the floodgates without regard to the fact that every foreigner who wishes to become Kenyan must first be vetted?

To ask any Somali who claims to be Kenyan to prove the claim is now discriminatory. The door has, accordingly, been thrown wide open for entry. Ruto must know this. His mission in the North cannot, therefore, be said to have been granting citizenship rights to Kenyans who have been discriminated against. It was to lay out infrastructure for amassing votes from this region. The argument that such votes may be from foreigners across the border cannot be dismissed. Does the President’s act of magnanimity seem to amount to placing personal political goals over collective national interests?

There are other problems, too. Take security for example. The Somali cannot, of course, be collectivised, by any standard, as a security risk to the Kenyan nation. Yet the situation that has been obtained in the region for the past 62-odd years points to insecurity, mostly from across the border. It hinges on solid and complex historical factors. At the bottom of them is the question of Somali nationalism. The desire by the entire Somali community in the Horn of Africa to live together as one autonomous nation.

In the volume titled State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (2011), Martin Meredith revisits the challenge that is the Somali question in Eastern Africa and the attendant insecurity across borders. He recalls that the Somali people of Eastern Africa have over the decades yearned for the establishment of their own State, away from what colonial meddling created. Europeans scattered the Somalis into five entities that ignored their unique ethnic solidarity. Ethnicity is indeed the one reason the Somalis have fought outsiders and even fought among themselves.

At independence, the Republic of Somalia was in a very unique situation. It was easily the only country that was ethnically one nation, perhaps with close resemblance only with Rwanda and Burundi. The nationals had a common language and pastoralist culture. They were unlike the rest of Africa where linguistic identity and disparate cultures have been at once sources and drivers of divisiveness and violent armed conflict. But they also had Islam as a unifying religion, unlike other places where, apart from language, religion has made them a veritable Tower of Babel. And yet colonialism had, at independence, scattered the Somali in five different directions.

The scramble and partition of Africa among the so-called great European powers (1884–5), created French Somaliland, which would later become Djibouti; British Somaliland, and Italian Somaliland which would together go on to become the Republic of Somalia today. Another segment of the Somali people was placed in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, while a fifth one to the south became, first, a part of the British East Africa Protectorate, and after that a part of the Kenya Colony. It subsequently became a part of the Republic of Kenya. Somalia itself became independent in July 1960, under President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar.

National flag

At this time (1960), their relatives in French Somaliland, the Kenya Colony and in Ogaden, yearned to be a part of the new independent Somali nation. But the government in Mogadishu, too, longed for “the Greater Somalia” nation, under one national flag, within common borders. The Somali national flag, whose spikes point in five different directions, says it all. Each spike speaks to one of the five Somali presences, or even absences, depending on how you look at it. It is a cherished national dream to unify them, someday. Does Ruto’s intervention in the ended the week bring this dream closer?

ALSO READ: 2027: A reckoning for broken promises and Kenya's political realities

This dream has come fully loaded with insecurity. It has kept regional governments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea permanently on their toes.

Kenya, over the past six decades (and going), has instituted strict regulations for citizenship not just in counties along the border with Somalia, but also for every border community in the country. Hence, the kind of “discrimination” that President Ruto and Senator Kerrow decry against the Somalis, has historically afflicted other peoples, too. Some of those affected by this “discrimination” are Luhya clans along the border with Uganda, in Busia, Bungoma, and Trans Nzoia counties. Others are the Turkana who border South Sudan; and the Luo, Maasai, Kuria and Taveta, who border Tanzania. The Digo also live in both Kenya and Tanzania, across the Lungalunga border. This “discrimination” affects them, too.

The Somali challenge has, however, been unique and pronounced due to the turbulence in Somalia itself. It is instructive, for example, that a day ahead of the President’s visit, five chiefs were abducted by unknown assailants. They have not been rescued, or returned, at the time of this writing. The challenge morphs beyond issues of irredentism, to take on the character of international terrorism that places Kenya and the Kenyan passport in a delicate place, further to President Ruto’s populist edict on the national registration of Kenyan Somalis.

Kenya’s Operation Linda Nchi (Operation Protect the Country) of 2011–2012 was sparked by increasing forays into Kenya by bandits from Somalia. It sought to create a buffer zone between Kenya and Somalia. While some of the Kenyan officials sanctioned the hot pursuit of these bandits who were believed to have been a part of the terrorist Al-Shabaab, the truth remains that Al-Shabaab has been a security menace to Kenya. They have struck so many times, with devastating results, that it is easy to lose count.

President Ruto may need to assure Kenyans and their global friends that he is not opening them up to Al-Shabaab and other terror attacks. The situation remains daisy, despite the presence of a transitional assistance mission by the UN. While this is expected to end in October 2026, the possibility is shaken by acts like last week’s abduction of the five Kenyan chiefs.

The 2027 election anxiety at the top, and the attendant preparatory gerrymandering, are not likely to stop. As they gerrymander, however, it is to be hoped that national security, as well as the democratic character of the Kenyan nation, will not be compromised.

To flood the country with foreigners just because someone expects them to morph into their captive voters looks set to arrive with heavy challenges. They could call for a rethink. It is expected that there should still be a country and a nation long after the vote. 

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser