President William Ruto greets traders after he launched the new Chebukube Soko Kubwa market Bungoma County on January 24, 2025.
Eight months ago, William Ruto was grinning from ear to ear as he tried out the presidential chair in the Oval Office while Joe Biden stood behind him like a father figure. Usually, when White House occupants change, the pets get to stay – but with the loud return of the not-so-new sheriff in Washington, the lobbyists who achieved Ruto’s photo coup might need replacing.
Ruto has made no pretensions about being an Anglo-American client, and even though the British stepped back after his election, it was the US ambassador in Nairobi who provided much of the spine for the new wobbly administration when it was plagued by cost-of-living protests.
The US State Department’s scent is all over the Raila Odinga candidacy for the African Union chairmanship – suggested as a favour to free Ruto from incessant firefighting he had to adopt whenever the opposition leader created trouble. America’s erstwhile influence all but evaporated when the youth-led protests broke out in June last year.
As soon as Donald Trump took the oath last week, he froze all foreign aid and withdrew the US from the World Health Organisation. This has huge ramifications for Kenya. Kenya is the 10th largest recipient of American aid—some $846 million (Sh110 billion) divided into military ($12,775,101) and economic ($833,528,387) assistance—and all spending in funded programmes is on hold.
Daylight abductions
Kenya, which is weighed down by a Sh10 trillion debt, is an expensive, high-maintenance poodle that looks to the US for its get-out-of--debt-jail negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. That special relationship is about to receive a body-check, given that Trump’s direct and disarming engagement with Russia and China very much takes Kenya out of play in the global contest for favour.
Last year, Kenya had 1,866 demonstrations, according to Armed Conflict & Event Data, even as the streets have progressively become more dangerous sites of protest. Police have violently broken up almost all demonstrations, including one protesting against a spate of femicide, but played possum in the wake of an epidemic of abductions of digitally active young people. It might not be the ‘defaecation central' Trump has previously referred to before but is no notoriety to warrant US attention.
Kenya is, therefore, being cut loose at a time when Ruto’s hold onto power has grown tenuous since the youth protests against tax increases last year. On the surface, the administration performs expansive conciliation gestures that co-opt opposition leaders into Cabinet while retaining many of the President’s odious allies.
Under the surface, the hollowed out Ruto administration has employed stifling containment measures against protests, attended by crackdowns on online activism, and daylight abductions that often end in executions. The youth-led protests bucked the country’s ethnic-based politics, but Ruto has done everything to redraw the old lines by appointing the political old guard into government to strengthen his hand.
The cooptation of the erstwhile opposition into the broad-based government has created a parliamentary mass choir for the President, with former vocal critics supplying soloists for the orchestra of sycophancy. The youth, who constitute over 40 per cent of the population, are disillusioned at the backhanded compliment they have received for each of their demands.
Public hostility
They asked for a clean, lean Cabinet; they got the same of odious selection from the President’s allies topped up with new turncoat sycophants from the opposition. They demanded an end to wasteful public spending and were instead served with devious new ways of pilferage. They asked for an audit of profligate borrowing, and were awarded a dead-on-arrival taskforce, coupled with dishonest public-private-partnership deals in airport facelift, energy transmission and health insurance.
None of these measures have addressed the trust deficit Ruto and the government continue to suffer from and much of the country remains hostile. Over the past seven months, the Ruto administration has successfully demobilised the old opposition but unwittingly gifted the country a new government critic in the person of impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. The official hostility reserved for legacy media has been turned on online users, whose use of parody, caricature and invective has got under the President’s skin.
The government is unable to control the digital space. It is poetic justice that Ruto, whose online guerillas ran a deliberate scheme to ferret out, profile and expose people who might testify as prosecution witnesses in the crimes against humanity case at the International Criminal Court, is today anguished about online trolls. Karma is, indeed, a gender-neutral dog.
Ruto continues to face significant public hostility as he tries to reassert his claim to legitimacy. He has ramped up his public engagements as regular performances of insecurity but is growing bolder in claiming that he does not desire popularity. His new parrot, freshly installed in the Deputy President’s Office, has repeated the claim.
The writer is a member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission board and writes in his individual capacity ([email protected] @kwamchetsi)
