President William Ruto greets Chief of Defence Forces Gen. Charles Kahariri at the National Defence University-Kenya in Lanet, Nakuru County, on November 22, 2024. Looking on are Defence CS Soipan Tuya (second left) and her Education counterpart Julius Ogamba look on.
The piece of drama that spawned the legendary idiom, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’, will be the entry for the Olenana Ngeos Secondary School at the next edition of the National Schools Drama Festival.
The play, King Henry IV, will make it all the way from the district and regional preliminary onto the national finals, and then the drama will start.
The fellows at State House who make it their business to shield President William Ruto’s sensitive eyes and ears will determine that the play is provocative.
Inspector-General of Police Douglas Kanja will relocate from his office to personally take charge of security at the theatre environs to ensure such a dangerous piece of subversion does not take to the stage.
He will deploy not just the usual police riot squad, but also the General Service Unit Recce Squad, the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, the Anti-Stock Theft Unit and the Rapid Deployment Forces.
Cabinet Secretary Soipan Tuya will be told to sign a Gazette notice emanating from the State House authorising deployment of the Kenya Defence Forces to the special operations zone.
Although she cannot tell the business end of the carbine, the CS for Defence will be personally present in her designer combat fatigues at the head of the Kenya Army Special Forces detachment called out to neutralise the high schoolgirls.
The Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Charles Kahariri, will be trotted out to deliver a fierce warning that any play, song, or chant seen to encompass, invent, device, intend or imagine the death, removal, restraint or deposition of the President will be construed as high treason.
Somewhere in the background, Director of Criminal Investigations Mohammed Amin and Director-General of the National Intelligence Service Noordin Haji will be poring over an avalanche of reports filed from across the country by agents tasked with arresting and detaining the author of the subversive play, one William Shakespeare.
The field agents, operating in mufti with unmarked cars and faces concealed behind balaclavas and dark glasses, will be under instructions that once Mr Shakespeare is arrested, he will not be booked into any police station or produced before a magistrate, but held incommunicado in a secret cell.
Public uproar
He will be denied access to lawyers and family as he is tortured to give information on his network of subversives in politics, media, civil society, academia and other groupings. Of course, there will be a major public uproar, and in aggressive attempts at damage control, a large retinue of government petty bureaucrats will be lined up to offer lame explanations.
Cabinet Secretary for Education Migos Ogamba will release a statement affirming that William Shakespeare is not a staffer at Olenana Ngeos, and neither is he in the Teachers Service Commission register.
He will produce a new set of hitherto unknown regulations stating that only teachers and students of their respective schools can write and direct plays intended for the festival. He will issue a stern warning to school heads who invite outsiders to help with drama, music, sports and other co-curricular activities that they will be held liable for serious crimes.
He will not explain how that contentious production passed muster all the way from village preliminaries to qualify for the national finals; and become eligible for Presidential Command Performance at State House.
The organisers of the annual drama showpiece will also be paraded before the cameras to read State House scripts denouncing the play they had okayed. They will charge that the playwright altered the script on reaching the national stage to include treasonous ‘Ruto Must Go’ chant. They will not explain how they know the script was changed, yet they had not watched the banned version.
Counter-offensive
Scores of MPs, ruling party activists, State House bloggers and even pro-regime media personnel will be mobilised to go on the counter-offensive launching shrill attacks on Shakespeare. The English playwright, who lived between 1564 and 1616, will be labelled an agent of foreign masters, a subversive element and a tool of opposition forces.
President Ruto himself will finally weigh in, warning critics against weaponising schoolchildren against authority.
Indeed, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Were it not for the extreme insecurity, paranoia and inferiority complex that pervades President Ruto’s State House, a play that would have passed largely unnoticed garnered national and global attention.
It exposed a frail and unsure regime scared of its own shadows, and ready to take Kenya back to the dark days of repression to secure itself against any challenges.
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