Lowering the bar: Has Ruto discarded Executive decorum in bid to outdo Gachagua?

It is difficult, and often impossible, to break habits acquired at home. Psychologists tell us that such habits are deeply ingrained in us, through many years of repetition, that they define who we are. They operate at a profoundly deep mental level and are so wired in us that they are automatic. They are resistant to change, even when riding against heavy tides of public outrage. 

Moreover, experts tell us that what we learned at home as children provides a strong sense of coping and security. It is familiar, automatic, and comforting. It is a part of our nest, our comfort zone. To tell us to apologise, for example, is to ask for too much if this has not been a part of our upbringing. 

Does Kenya’s current political class seem to have picked up difficult habits at home? Do you require such habits to be a successful politician in this country? Do we expect too much from them when we condemn their public excesses?

On March 22, 2022, Mama Ngina Kenyatta characterised William Ruto as poorly brought up. Campaigns for the presidency were just getting into the high noon of electoral toxicity. Politicians threw common decency to the devil, with Ruto in a prominent role. 

The fallout between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Ruto, then his deputy, was reaching a head. Ruto was piqued that Uhuru was openly backing Raila Odinga as his successor. In the ensuing rhetoric of ingratitude and betrayal, Ruto deepened the invective into the wider Kenyatta family. He painted them in appalling colours and spared none of them. 

It was at this point that Kenya’s inaugural First Lady labelled him “a poorly brought up character". He had no respect for his elders and none for leadership generally, she said. Accordingly, his abusive language reflected his unfortunate upbringing. Rather harsh, you would say. But that was what the mother of the Kenyan nation thought of Kenya’s future President. 

“Let me tell those who are going around abusing others, we will leave them alone if that is how they were taught to be abusive when they were growing up,” Mama Ngina remarked in response to Ruto’s unremitting boorish assault on families he styled as “dynastic”, and especially the Kenyatta, Moi, and Odinga families.  

It was not normal for Mama Ngina to make such remarks.  Kenya’s elder matron has traditionally avoided political commentary, despite her deep political background. Her father was the Senior Chief Muhoho wa Gathecha, who lived between 1872 and 1966. He was a respected leader in the wider Kiambu; a wealthy and generous individual, whose later relations with colonial authorities deteriorated steadily, due to his association with Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau. 

Then, of course, there were the two Presidents: Kenyatta, his spouse, and her son. This is to say nothing of other political relatives, like her brother George Muhoho, her sister-in-law Beth Mugo, her nephew, Ngengi Muigai, and her stepson Peter Muigai Kenyatta, all of whom were MPs at one time or another. Her stepdaughter, Margaret Kenyatta, represented the Kilimani Ward in the defunct City Council of Nairobi. She served as the city's third mayor after independence, from 1970 to 1976. Muhoho served in the Cabinet under President Moi. 

Despite such a solid political background, Mama Ngina stays out of politics and especially outside political commentary. When she steps out of the shadows to make a pronouncement, such as that of March 22, 2022, something is grossly wrong in the polity. As it was then, Kenyans are today shocked at the verbal free-for-all between President Ruto and his adversaries in the Opposition. 

The political top brass in the country can be awfully deficient in a sense of occasion. It is malnourished in the ethics of discourse. Ruto loves to see himself as an outsider. In 2022, he was “a hustler,” battling an entrenched “dynastic” political and economic elite.  Today, he has fashioned himself as the “indefatigable working President”. He is being “disrupted” by “stupid people, who have no brains. Thieves and murderers.”

While he says he is a gym goer, an abstemious eater, and a gentleman who manages his libido well, his detractors are indolent characters. In his eyes, their libido is in overdrive. They are omnivorous eaters with ravenous appetites. They are obese individuals who suffer from zipper anxiety and who kill at will. They sleep at public meetings, where they defile the air with foul gastric energies and sundry gaseous activities.  

This is vintage Ruto, Kenya’s President in his element. He eloquently shoots from the hip. He pays no heed to the composition of his audience, nor to his status. Yes, he is not alone in this. His disgraced former deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, fired the first salvo, body-shaming Ruto about his physique, and especially drawing the nation’s attention to Ruto’s earlobes, about which Kenyans have so far had no problem with. It was patently in bad taste for Gachagua to body shame the President. It is not the done thing. 

The ethics of discourse concerns standards in public engagement, particularly for those perceived as exemplars and role models. Ruto and Gachagua belong here. They are expected to calibrate their words; to speak with aplomb, even under extreme provocation. Ruto, in particular, demonstrates that he lacks aplomb. Angry and abusive rhetoric increasingly defines him. 

To be fair to Ruto, however, that is the style in this arena. Someone has told these thespians that there is heroism in insolent rhetoric. And yes, the idle crowds that assemble at their noisy rallies show that they enjoy the outrage. They laugh and clap, in the style of the groundlings in Shakespearean theatre. 

Styled as “stinkards”, Elizabethan groundlings, or yahoos as Jonathan Swift called them. They were rowdy theatre goers. They would hiss, boo, yell, and throw objects at actors whom they did not like. Yet, unlike the yodellers in Kenya’s political theatre, Shakespearean groundlings were wage earners. The yodellers that Ruto and Gachagua address are basically idlers. Jobless youth for hire, ready for just about any dirty job that can afford a day’s keep. 

It does not seem to bother Kenya’s verbally violent political class that these mobs are a time bomb, waiting for the ripe moment to explode. Ruto, Gachagua and their groupies have advised themselves that elections will reward emotional mobilisation, and not civility. There is also some level of media appeal in these ugly dramas, both in the legacy and emerging media. Politicians like Ruto and Gachagua, accordingly, play to this gallery. They gain electorally by violating decency and decorum. 

Yet, is civility not expected of exemplars who hold elevated public office, such as the Presidency? Beyond the crowds that Ruto engages in live performance is the rest of the nation. This population has demanded an apology from their President. Ruto has been categorical. He will not apologise. He has no regrets. And to prove this, he has not only repeated the unsavoury remarks, but he has also promised to reserve one per cent of his working time to these dramas. 

But does Ruto ignore the institutional fragility in which he enacts these dramas? President Donald Trump of the US may engage Americans in similar hostile rhetoric. Yet, he does not get as murky as Ruto does. Second, the US has entrenched norms that soon return him to the rails. In Kenya, Chapter Six of the Constitution is decorative rather than purposive. When the President models incivility, there are no buffers to absorb it. It flows straight into the populace, where it breeds collective hostility among the citizens. And it tends to be hostile to an ethnic definition. Are Ruto and Gachagua, accordingly, signalling the country towards a repeat of the 2007/2008 violent electoral dramas? 

Is the Kenyan nation at risk of witnessing violent rhetoric diffuse from the top, through intermediate politicians on both sides, all the way down to the grassroots? Is the country safe? Both Team Ruto and Team Gachagua miss the point in their obdurate non-repentance. No one is asking Ruto to apologise to Gachagua, nor the reverse. No, Kenyans are rather outraged at the scandalous rhetoric by both leaders. 

When Ruto, especially, responds to criticism by doubling down as he has done, he wrongly reframes public concern as concern about his personal clash with his adversaries. By contrast, however, Kenyans are concerned about the public ethics dimension of the drama. Ruto has abused the democratic public sphere. He has eroded the dignity of the Office of the President by defiling Kenya’s national norms of shared public space and public conversations, especially by people in high office. 

Kenyans are offended not because President Ruto has no respect for his political adversaries. No, they are rather offended because the President has no respect for them. He is polluting the oxygen of public discourse and remains unapologetic about it. The distinction between the President and those he accuses of gastric offences is very slim. The apology that Kenyans want from Ruto cannot be strategically sidestepped as he has attempted to do.

Kenyans are not telling Ruto to say to Gachagua and Dr Fred Matiang’i, “I am sorry, my opponents, I abused you.” They want him to say to the nation, “Fellow Kenyans, I have come to realise that I have not conducted myself in a manner befitting the office to which you have elevated me, and in which I am privileged to serve. I have let you down by failing to meet the standard I owe you. I am sorry, fellow Kenyans, forgive my momentary lapse in self-composure. I will manage myself better in the future.” 

If political messaging will sink so low that the owners remain obdurate, then the citizens must continue to see their leaders as inherently vulgar, possibly as a matter of upbringing. Tragically, both the leaders and the institutions they head must then lose their symbolic authority. For its part, public discourse must then get coarse beyond easy repair. Citizens must invariably gravitate towards democratic fatigue and moral investment in political leadership. 

President Ruto is right in at least one thing, however. Rigathi Gachagua’s unsavoury public pronouncements make him a poor choice for leadership. But by the same token, should Ruto lead? Placed on the weighing scales of common decency in leadership, they return the same weight. 

Democratic rule does not collapse only through coups in places like Mali and Burkina Faso. It also erodes through the normalisation of contempt for norms and standards. Ruto has steadily distinguished himself as a non-respecter of norms, standards, and institutions. What the laws say, what Kenyans think, what is conscionable; all these seem to signify little, or even nothing to their President. He is an odd President, who sees things his own way, and who will unapologetically have things done his way, anyway. 

He operates at the outer limits of executive discretion. His impatient pace and his loud and caustic language erode confidence in him as a democratic ruler. His governance style appears increasingly unilateral, situated at the frontier between what is lawful and what is unlawful. Yet, the discipline of consultation, contestation, and consensus that he dislikes is not to be taken lightly. In tax measures, in social health insurance, in taking Kenyan troops overseas, and in affordable housing programmes, he visibly bulldozes his way through public opinion. He looks bad. For, there is a very fine line between decisiveness and autocracy. 

To boot, he couches those with contrary opinions in disgusting idioms. He treats alternative opinion as sabotage, to be met with insolent rhetoric and muscular presidential fiat. In the process, the President is normalising the erosion of the dignity of his office and contempt for public opinion. More tragically, he is putting into peril peaceful coexistence between those who agree with him and those who do not. His hostile messaging is shaping and entrenching dangerous identity divides that could return to haunt the nation in August 2027 and to the International Criminal Court. 

Dr Muluka is a communications adviser