As Deputy President Kithure Kindiki’s chopper landed, the rotor blades shook the drying stalks of shrubs in a frenzied dance, the wind whipping a trail of a dust storm. This was on November 10, 2024 at Mwatate, Taita Taveta County.
Mwatate is sometimes a harsh place, not like the misty parts of Wundanyi in Upper Taita — the mist spiralling like white smoke, the flowers shimmering, the hint of blossom on the trees and the scent of new growth after the rains.
The dry Mwatate was a portrait of a land in need. Therefore, hopes were high as the DP landed. And far away, from the coast of Mombasa to the lake town of Kisumu, President William Ruto’s supporters were anxious if he had made the right choice of DP a few days earlier when DP Kindiki had been sworn in.
On Saturday, February 8, 2024, DP Kindiki marked 100 days in office. What has he achieved? During his swearing-in, President Ruto told him, “I need your voice, I need your intellect to help me… to speak to the things we are doing”.
DP Kindiki took up his job with pin-point focus, one could easily imagine him in command of a warship, eyes gleaming with purpose as he peers through the fog at a rugged coastal village he is about to conquer. Or like a prophet brought to the top of a mountain, and as the wind whips his face, he turns to the shadowed skies of Kenya’s chaotic political climate to prophesy a clearer direction.
To get to this focused direction, he is employing a sort of “narrative turn” in government communications. As defined elsewhere, “The ‘narrative turn’ refers to a significant shift in various academic disciplines towards recognising the importance of narratives in understanding human experience, culture, and knowledge”. This narrative turn emphasises the role of storytelling and narratives in shaping how individuals and communities see their world.
Prof Kindiki’s first task was to establish himself as an anti-thesis of his predecessor, Mr Gachagua, who had doubled down on the “shareholder” narrative, implying that communities with more votes deserved more of the national cake. To counter this shareholder narrative, one of DP Kindiki’s first visits after being sworn in was to Taita, to a mostly marginalised people with fewer votes compared to many other communities.
My people of Taita know how to mask their pain of being left out of successive governments. Most dreams don’t get out of Taita land, they die there. “Well, it was never meant to be”, they say with the detached indifference of people used to disappointments, and if this is said in the Taita language, the vowels are sadder than in any language I know. In happier conversations, they transition into the sliding rhythms of the language — sometimes rough to the ear when the consonants stop suddenly when spoken in haste or in anger, but the sound is mostly smooth and as soothing as listening to the humming of bees.
Growing up surrounded by poverty, as young men, we had terrifying visions of our future wives and children — homeless, huddling under a bridge or shivering in threadbare clothes in grass-thatched huts under a moonlit Tropical sky.
By that visit and subsequent ones to Taita Taveta and several other parts of the country, especially to marginalised areas, DP Kindiki flipped the dominant shareholder narrative on its head in a “narrative turn”. DP Kindiki came up with an effective counter-narrative that insists on a “united, prosperous and inclusive” Kenya.
His narrative seems to be: “We will remain focused on delivery”. To differentiate himself from his predecessor, whereas his predecessor could be given to displays of disruptive energy, DP Kindiki seems to have the calm air of an unhurried man. He is a patient storyteller and takes almost a professorial, thought-out approach — not given to fidgety, skittering words. He speaks like one reaching for higher concentrated pellets of wisdom that he dispenses in small doses — to unite rather than divide. His methodology to shore up support for President Ruto’s administration is a “big tent” approach — bringing as many people across the board as possible.
After 100 days in office, he can look back to an illustrious career he probably didn’t see in the solitude of Moi University grounds where he was a quiet student. And, in strange contrast with the meditative quiet and lowly duties of those early years, came the crowded vicissitudes of the tempestuous course through which he reached the DP position — lawyer, senator, deputy speaker and friend of President Ruto — and in his sudden elevation keeping the gracious humility of his earlier days.
Since joining politics, step by step, the DP has risen in distinction, despite many odds. And as the writer Alexander Maclaren would have put it, for DP Kindiki, “The silent energy of purpose presses his fortunes onward with a motion slow and inevitable as that of a glacier. The steadfast flow circles unchecked round, or rises victorious over all hindrances. Efforts to ruin, to degrade, to stop… to crush him — one and all fail… He moves onward as stars in their courses move”. The DP has a long way to go but he is aggressively charting his own destiny after 100 days in office.
