A courtship mission: President returns to an angry but vote rich mountain

President William Ruto returns to the Mt Kenya region on a pacification and political courtship mission following a bitter fallout with the populace in recent months. 

He comes at the nadir of his fortunes on an assignment that is billed as inspection of ongoing projects and launching of new ones. However, the president and his team know that he is at once on a political campaign and on a fact finding mission. Can this region stand with him in 2027 as it did before, or should he forget it altogether and move on? He is accused of orchestrating the impeachments of Rigathi Gachagua and now former Meru Governor, Kawira Mwangaza. Can he assuage the region and carry it with him into his future political dreams? These are the big questions taking Ruto to the Mountain. If the Mountain cannot be salvaged, how should he navigate his way to 2027 and beyond? That is the riddle. 

Three years ago, Dr Ruto was the darling of the Mountain. He criss-crossed the landscape, preaching his bottom-up political agenda to swarms of converted crowds that were bursting with love for him. He was the visiting conquering messiah. He had come to rescue them from what he framed as the dynastic rule of the Kenyatta, Moi and Odinga families. 

Characterizing himself as a poor man’s son and the spokesperson and saviour of the wretched of the earth, Ruto – then President Uhuru Kenyatta’s besieged deputy –  drew massive empathy from adoring indigenes of the Mountain. They would not listen to Uhuru as he entreated them to vote for Raila Odinga as his successor to Kenya’s highest and most powerful office.

Today, Ruto returns to the region in the shadows of shattered dreams and broken promises. Austere Kenya Kwanza economic policies and culpable wastefulness and reckless splurging of public resources has combined with political naivete to scatter to the four winds the massive following that Ruto enjoyed among the hoi polloi of the Mountain. Christened the hustlers, the great unwashed masses of Kenya believed that Ruto was the man to take them to the proverbial promised land of milk and honey. His government, however, set off on an insensitive happy-go-lucky false footing. The fanfare at the top contrasted with the agony at the bottom to drive him far from the original support base, with the Mountain and youthful Kenyans, called the Gen-Zs, in the lead. 

 The fallout with his first deputy Gachagua, in particular, has had a catalytic effect in the fallout. Gachagua was impeached on October 8, last year, on 11 grounds, in a process that was hugely stage-managed by Ruto’s State House. The fallout in the Mountain region was instant. Local MPs, who voted to impeach Gachagua, still find it difficult to as much as greet the people at a funeral. Unlike previous presidential principal assistants, such as Dr Josaphat Karanja and Joseph Murumbi, who retreated from public limelight upon unhappy separation from office, Gachagua elected to pick up the cudgels against the boss. He took the political war to Ruto. He has vowed that Ruto will not rule Kenya for more than one term. He has been busy massing political troops in the region, ahead of joining up forces with other efforts from other parts of the country, focused on sending Ruto home in August 2027.

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  Mt Kenya Visit

Acid test

President Ruto’s visit to the Mountain is, accordingly, an acid test in many ways. For a start, Gachagua recently cautioned Ruto to visit the Mountain only at the risk of running into heavy political headwinds. The warning was not taken kindly. The president’s acolytes in the region told off the former deputy president. Led by the master political gadfly, Kimani Ichung’wah, Kikuyu MP and Majority Leader in the National Assembly, they reminded Gachagua that he did not own the region nor the people, and that President Ruto was free to visit any part of the country, anytime. While it should never be the case anywhere, the sentiments on either side are up for testing during the current visit. 

President chosen soft Ruto’s re-entry point into the region is the consecration and instalment of new Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) bishop, Gerald Mwangi Muriithi, who was elected on February 8. The church is a relatively safe sanctuary, devoid of the usual chaos that have informed some of Ruto’s forays into parts of Nairobi and elsewhere. Ruto has kept running into uncooperative youth. They greet him with the now all too familiar echoes of “Ruto must go!” They punctuate his every sentence with interventions of “uongo!” which is to say. “Lies!” 

It is expected that the discipline that goes with the one-way traffic order of activities in the Anglican church service will lend dignity and decorum to the occasion. Thereafter, things should be sufficiently thawed to give the president sedate space for the rest of his activities in the Mountain. These are expected to include inspection of projects in Murang’a, Tharaka Nithi, and Meru Counties. The Tharaka Nithi mission is expected to include paying homage to the deputy president, Prof Kithure Kindiki, who is groping for space and relevance as a possible regional political supremo. This, too, is part of the acid test during this visit. Can Prof. Kindiki eventually step forward in his home region to become what in Kenyan political parlance is called the regional spokesperson? 

It has been a very difficult season for Prof Kindiki. His efforts to grab the spokesman mantle from the abrasive and assertive types of Gachagua in the prevailing mood in the region is a hard nut. So strong are the headwinds that even level headed leaders like Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro and the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Justin Muturi have publicly distanced themselves from collective responsibility in the Kenya Kwanza environment. Muturi has become a pesky thorn that Ruto does not seem to know whether to leave in the flesh or to try to pull out. He is like a bullet lodged in a delicate part of the body. Should he remove it and face the attendant political risks and consequences?

But, regardless of whether Ruto acts or he remains trapped in lethargy about him, Muturi is sitting pretty. He remains outspoken against Ruto’s deteriorated democratic credentials, manifest mostly in what are understood to be State sponsored abductions, mysterious disappearances, torture and even killings of dissenters. He recently disclosed that he has written to the president, requesting to be excused from attending Cabinet meetings. At the same time, his Democratic Party has given a formal three-month notice, to leave the Kenya Kwanza coalition. Clearly Muturi understands where the heart of the region is. He does not wish to be left behind. 

This is besides, and beyond, the fact that his own son was one of the abductees in June last year, a matter he keeps taunting the president and the government with. He has asked them to come clean. If anything is awkward and embarrassing for the president of any country, it is the lethargic position into which this kind of ministerial posturing leaves the head of State and government. For now, Ruto has elected to live with the bullet that is Muturi, delicately lodged in his political liver. To touch it is too risky. 

Separately, Nyoro refused to be a part of the Gachagua impeachment imbróglio. He has since bitten the bullet by being demoted from chairing the Budget and Appropriations Committee of the National Assembly, and being thoroughly upbraided in the assembly by Ichung’wah and his Minority counterpart, Junet Mohamed. Yet, all the actors in this drama know only too well that the true political test sits not in Parliament, but on the ground in the Mt Kenya region. By the end of the week, Ruto will have had a first-hand opportunity to help him make up his mind on what he wants to do with the Mountain. In an environment in which he has now welcomed the ODM brigade to cohabit with him in the government, he has to make up his mind, on whether he should continue trying to court a region that is spasmodically throwing him out of its political digestive system, or if he should count his losses and move on. 

The Nyeri church meeting brings other dramatic riddles to the equation. Being Gachagua’s home county, it is expected that the former DP will attend the consecration function. The body language and other optics within the political class could steal the thunder from the programme of the day. Last week, the Most Reverend Jackson Ole Sapit denied Gachagua and Wiper Party Leader, Kalonzo Musyoka, with other political dignitaries, the opportunity to greet the congregation, at another consecration and installation of an Anglican bishop. “From now, we will not allow political leaders to speak in the Anglican Church,” he said at St. Stephen’s Church, Jogoo Road, “We will only recognise your presence. If you want, you can speak outside the church, but not in the sanctuary.” 

ACK edict

Will the primate of the Anglican Church live to this edict, or will he allow President Ruto “to greet the people”? If he does, where will this leave him and his church in a region that is increasingly hostile to the president’s politics? 

The choice of the Muriithi’s consecration for re-entry into the Mountain region mirrors a similar choice in October 1969. President Jomo Kenyatta had fallen out badly with both the political leadership and ordinary folk of the Luo Nyanza region, following the assassination of Tom Mboya, in what was seen as a State driven initiative. Earlier the same year, another Luo stalwart, Argwings Kodhek, had died in a suspicious car accident in Nairobi. Put together with deteriorated relations with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and the mainstay of the Luo political class at the time, President Kenyatta’s relations with the region could not possibly have been in worse fortunes. 

Four months after the Mboya death, Kenyatta elected to test the waters in Luo Nyanza, much the same way President Ruto is now testing the waters in the Mountain. The outcome on 25 October 1969 was noisy, messy, and with far reaching consequences, as the political class in Kenya would say. There was a dramatic verbal free-for-all between Kenyatta and Jaramogi. Words that should never be said were said. The ugly verbal drama gave way to stone-throwing and gun violence. Dozens were killed on the spot. Jaramogi’s party, Kenya People’s Union (KPU) was banned the following day, and Jaramogi and KPU’s top leaders were detained without trial. Some, like Achieng Oneko and Wasonga Sijeyo, were forgotten in prison for between six and nine years. Suspicions between Luo Nyanza and the Mountain have never healed fully, to date. 

Ruto’s re-entry and fact finding mission in the Mountain conjures up such historical memories, with the prayer and hope that wise counsel prevails in what everyone on both sides of the political divide says, and how they behave. In 1969, President Kenyatta used the official opening of the New Nyanza Provincial General Hospital as the excuse to be in Kisumu. This was despite the fact that the hospital had been around and functional for a number of years. It was also despite the fact that his government had been hostile to the construction of the hospital, because of its funding by Jaramogi’s friends in the Soviet Union. There was not much else for Mzee Kenyatta to use as the reason for visiting the region at this time. He accused Jaramogi and his “vinyangarika,” which is to say “idiots” , of failing to appreciate “development” that the government had brought to Kisumu.

President Ruto will also be talking of development in the Mountain. It is not clear at the time of this writing what specific development projects the president is going to inspect in the region. They seem to be hard to find, even as the decision to inspect them is made. Last year Ruto was accused of launching “new projects” that had been launched before, either by President Uhuru Kenyatta, or by other government officials, including by himself, when he served as deputy president. Most of those relaunched projects have not moved an inch since then. It will be interesting to see how the president navigates his way around them this time. 

The president’s pet housing project is about the only assignment that seems to be making some headway, despite the opaqueness and controversy that surrounds it. There were also a number of road tarmacking projects in the region, and it will be of interest to see how well, or otherwise, they have done. Still, there is very little to show of development by the Kenya Kwanza government, across the country. Prof. Kindiki and Prime CS, Musalia Mudavadi, have often pleaded for more time. They say that two years is too short a time for any meaningful infrastructural development. They have pleaded for at least six to seven years. 

While this is an indirect way of asking for a second term to Ruto, it is true that a lot can be achieved within such time as Ruto has so far had, by a more focused and purposeful government. Kenyans of older age remember the first four years of the Moi regime as a season of unprecedented macroeconomic growth and development that subsequent regimes have not borrowed from. Between December 1979 and January 1983 President Moi widened and resurfaced the road from Mombasa to Malaba and Busia. Other notable roadworks saw tarmac get to Meru for the first time, and major bitumen roads taken to Marigat and Eldama Ravine all the way to Eldoret. Indeed, there was bitumen road construction allover the country. 

There was construction of Nyayo Wards and Nyayo dormitories in schools virtually everywhere, to say nothing of the Nyayo Tea Zones, the state Nyayo Bus Company, and Nyayo milk that some people enjoyed as striplings in school. The economy grew. Jobs were created. Kenya was on the move. Then, of course, things suddenly went bust, which is a different story. 

But back to the Mountain, President Ruto will be assessing the viability of his hopes in the region in 2027, and how best to navigate the emerged challenges, now that his fortunes here are on the wane. In the 1980s and the ‘90s, President Moi ignored the region and survived, by courting the rest of the country. Conscious efforts were made to demonize the Mountain, and by so doing solidify the rest of the country against this region. Is the same script at work, once again? And if it is, how far can it go? It was easy for Moi to manage without the region in a first-past-the-post era. Then, the winning presidential candidate only required a simple majority to romp home. That era ended in 2010. 

Vote basket

The present dispensation of 50 per cent plus one vote is a riddle that puts in jeopardy anyone who imagines they can succeed without the Mountain. Moreover, IEBC records show that President Ruto got at least 3.5 millions of his 7.1 million votes in 2022 from the Mountain, to say nothing of its diaspora elsewhere in the country. That could easily number another one million votes. Put together with general disaffection against Kenya Kwanza, a tough task lies ahead of the president. It does not matter that in virtual terms the numbers will be different in 2027. The percentages hardly change, even if the base will change.

With close to 56 per cent of his 2022 vote to substitute from elsewhere, William Ruto has an unenviable uphill assignment. It is hardly possible that the present sweet talking visits can save his presidency, to give it a second term. Not even underhand methods could deliver victory. Dr Ruto needs to consider pausing from his rolling-stone-early-campaign sweet talking missions, to ask himself a few hard questions. Why do Kenyans, especially the youth, seem to have lost faith in him? Where did he go wrong? Can he salvage himself, or is it a lost cause? If he finds that it is lost, as he is very likely to find, the thing to do is to begin preparing the country for a smooth succession in 2027. It does not look like a matter that can be sorted out with unending loud-speaking top-of-the-car whirlwind campaigns. 

Dr Muluka is an expert in politics and international relations