Ruto's belittling of Opposition taking Kenya towards anarchy

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Sometimes, power is louder than its intended purpose. At such times, social science wants to borrow metaphors from pure science to speak of social and political entropy. Kenya, under the UDA regime, tempts you with that kind of borrowing.  

Nearly 16 years after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya (2010), systems are steadily moving from the order and respect for institutions towards randomness and volatility. This is entropy, a drift from stability towards chaotic randomness. Does this seem like a deliberate policy thrust by the Ruto government? Destabilise everything, reap from the chaos?

Governance, at any rate, appears steeped in social and political haphazardness. A joyous national executive occupies the driver’s seat. In physics, specifically, entropy speaks to disorder in a closed system. If systems are left unattended, they will become disorderly. There is uncertainty, unpredictability, and, in short, disorder. Nothing seems to happen in any predictable manner.

There is a growing absence of certainty and reduced confidence in the system to work and to deliver the desired results. Social and political systems may not be closed in the manner that physics understands scientific systems to be closed. Yet, Kenya in 2026 is steadily degenerating into a disordered closed system, with the President in the lead.

The institutional and legal order, discipline, and certainty promised in 2010 diminish every day. President William Ruto’s daily rallies, his caustic speeches, and his loud and insolent belittling of the Opposition are the pacesetters towards anarchy.  Ruto leads hostile merrymakers, who traverse the country, repeating the same grating insolence against adversaries. They call them “empty-headed numbskulls, complete brainless imbeciles, with absolutely nothing to offer the nation.”  

There is an increased high-sounding rhetoric without equal logic and clarity in what the President and his groups are saying. It would seem that someone has told them to “repeat, repeat, and repeat, until it takes traction.” 

Yes, it begins gaining traction. But is it the traction of entropy, rather than transformational logic and clarity? When the President abandons his office to daily cut across the country, dishing out money to youth and availing himself of the opportunity to grate the nation with the self-same disrespectful soundbites, the country moves steadily towards disorder.  

State House leads the nation towards a breakdown in norms that should otherwise hold us together, despite our different ways of looking at issues. The national moral framework begins collapsing when, instead of criticising Opposition perspectives, the head of state and government sinks into unchecked abusive language.  

By this alone, the President invites disrespect and cynicism towards himself as an individual, and towards the Presidency as a national unifying entity. President Ruto is feeding Kenyans on a daily preachy diet of angry and disrespectful words that invariably begin undermining trust in him and in his government. Together with his deputy, Prof Kithure Kindiki, and super CS Aden Duale, they are pushing the country towards crude sectarian and tribal enclaves.

Points of public discourse convergence are morphing into shrines of tedious, daily, abusive rituals, as the Opposition develops its own counter-offensive, abusive rituals. Evening news on TV is predictable, with astounding precision. Substitute a few place names here and there, and the rest is the same nauseating scorn of yesterday. There is no freshness of thought, nothing presidential, no illumination. Why does the World Bank even fund such dross?  

Sunday church presence, by Government or Opposition chiefs, has lost meaning and decorum. Service has degenerated into empty rituals. The emptiness can be read on the bored faces of churchgoers. You see yawning worshippers on TV screens every Sunday evening. In the attendant messaging, noise is the most dominant currency. There is sound without logic, and conspiracy without evidence.

The tragedy is that the President is the lead player in this appalling game of musical chairs. President Ruto and his handlers need to wake up to the fact that they are diluting state authority. A President who invades citizens’ living rooms with daily loud insolence begins becoming an irritating, unwanted guest. He arrives not with clarity of vision, but with reactive governance.  

Moreover, Ruto’s surges into the countryside have removed one thing from the domain of doubt. That is, the state has become the primary site of extraction of wealth. For whatever other purposes the wealth is being extracted, there is also no doubt that much of it is going towards treating voters, ahead of next year’s election. In the process, corruption is normal, institutions are dysfunctional, and public expectations of this government are lowered. That is World Bank-funded entropy. 

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