Kenyan Protests, Part One: The political education of President William Ruto

This is the first of a three part series on the current economic and political crises in Kenya. Part One will address the political foundations of the crisis. Part Two will tackle the real economic challenges that the current administration inherited, and arguably made worse. Finally, Part Three will conclude with some thoughts on the set of bad options on the table for the administration.

I: Reaping what he sowed

Over the last two weeks I have struggled to understand why President William Ruto has turned out to be a much worse politician than Candidate William Ruto. For someone who won the presidency on a populist message, he completely misjudged the months-long simmering public anger over proposed new taxes amidst the rising cost of living, public sector corruption, in-your-face flaunting of opulence by corruption officials on social media, deteriorating public services, and generalized erosion of government legitimacy.

So far his reactions suggest that the events of June 25, 2024 — when countrywide anti-tax protests culminated in the storming of Parliament in Nairobi — caught him by surprise. Forget the polls that highlighted public discontent with his tax measures in the 2024 Finance Bill, myriad op-eds in the papers, online chatter, and discussions on TV and radio talk-shows.

Perhaps he thought that he had sufficiently demobilized the opposition and neutered mass opposition to his aggressive tax policies after he cut a “cease fire” deal with former Prime Minister Raila Odinga (and officially nominated him to head the African Union). Or perhaps he made a cynical calculation that his new taxes were most salient among a sliver of Kenyans (~3m) who principally operate in the formal economy, and so wouldn’t come with that big of a political cost as long as he had the countryside onside — this also fits with his administration’s ongoing embrace of class war rhetoric to shut down those with a contrary opinion. He could also have been distracted by the adulation he has been receiving from foreign governments and organizations since entering office — as of early June 2024 he had made 62 visits to 38 countries within just 20 months.

What Ruto failed to notice, however, is that his own presidential campaign had fundamentally shifted the political economy of (fiscal) policymaking in Kenya. He castigated Uhuru Kenyatta (and Odinga) for presiding for excessive borrowing, high taxes, wasteful subsidies, poor services, and a raft of anti-poor policies in an economy that was rigged to favor the establishment (forget that he was part of the administration as Deputy President). His anti-establishment populism (dubbed the “Hustler Movement”) mobilized countless unemployed or underemployed young voters and made them feel like the government owed them a working economy. These “hustlers’’ believed that their material fortunes would change under Ruto, and became invested in public policy — as witnessed by the unprecedented levels of public interest in minutiae of economic policymaking over the last two years.

Candidate Ruto’s 2022 populist mobilization essentially destroyed the social bases of political power in parts of the country where he won by undercutting establishment political figures in favor of loyal and dependent newcomers. While this was most vividly evident in the wider Mt. Kenya region, it was also true in other parts of the country where the UDA wave proved unstoppable. Instead of working with the usual established ethnic kingpins, Ruto largely operated through ambitious young political entrepreneurs, religious leaders, and direct populist appeals to voters.

The shift in style of political mobilization, increased salience of economic policy, and sky-high public expectations demanded a different politics of governing. Yet once in power Ruto quickly moved to demobilize the very wave that got him into power and surrounded himself with a larger-than-usual share of individuals intent on plundering public resources and less interested in competent service delivery. Perhaps he may have gotten away with this during good economic times. But in 2022 the Kenyan economy was teetering on the edge. Ruto inherited a mess of an economy following a decade of mismanagement under Kenyatta. The debt binge under Kenyatta and ballooning deficits demanded fiscal consolidation. A sovereign default wasn’t entirely off the cards given upcoming lumpy payments. The shilling was under pressure, a fact that increased inflationary pressures. The country was just recovering from a drought that had depressed agricultural output and pushed up food prices. Jobs were increasingly scarce. And real incomes had stagnated for the better part of a decade.

The manner of Ruto’s victory and personnel choices limited his ability to adequately address these myriad challenges. In Parliament, his populist wave yielded a majority of political lightweights who, despite occupying important leadership positions, are more interested in singing his praises than voicing their constituents’ grievances. Within the executive, individuals with neither experience nor expertise in public administration landed critical jobs. Furthermore, an air of vindictiveness towards the establishment that had rejected him in 2022 foreclosed on the possibility of seeking constructive feedback or support on important policy questions. The administration more or less declared war on institutions and firms that opposed his candidacy, including the media.

All this meant that the administration was primed to dismiss initial murmurs against the 2024 Finance Bill as middle class re-litigation of the 2022 presidential election. The hope was that online anger would not translate into offline political action and that any organized opposition would be negotiated with and bought off — just like happened last year when faced with anti-tax and cost-of-living protests.

Except this time was different. There were no ethnic kingpins to negotiate with or ethnic groups to scapegoat — the Gen Z protest movement branded itself as “leaderless” and “tribeless.” Public interest in the bill made it impossible for the administration to spin the tax measures as principally targeted at the “spoilt” middle class (everyone eats bread, it turns out). There were few social means of managing public anger left. Churches had become discredited as willing recipients of looted public resources in fundraisers. Ruto’s arriviste coalition members were more interested (more than typical establishment figures, I’d argue) in plundering public resources than doing grassroots political mobilization in support of his janus-faced fiscal consolidation efforts (more on this in the next post). If anything, their TikTok videos flaunting proceeds of graft fueled public anger at the administration.

It is astonishing how little the administration invested in selling the 2024 Finance Bill to the public. Legitimate critiques were dismissed as anti-Ruto delusions of the middle class. The government lacked any credible evidence of improvements in public services to justify further increases in taxes. The Treasury’s Principal Secretary and the National Assembly’s Finance Committee chair showed up for media availability unprepared and could not provide any coherent rationale for the proposed tax increases. All this fueled public perception that the Finance Bill was written in Washington by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as part of Kenya’s fiscal consolidation program — further eroding already threadbare government legitimacy.

All this to say that Ruto should have known better. Most reasonable commentators would agree that in 2022 his campaign elevated public discourse over policy in Kenya to a higher plane. He commendably diminished the role of ethnicity in elections. In promising to equalize the economic playing field he spoke to millions of Kenyans who had been disenfranchised by Kenyatta’s cronyism. Unfortunately for Kenyans, it appears that all he sought to do was destroy the old system but lacked any plans to build something new. And now he is reaping the rewards of that oversight.

II: A snowballing crisis of legitimacy

It is a cynical approach that might just work. Businesses that already have been losing money on protest days are loathe to lose their inventory to looters. The chaotic images from the protests might also scare enough people to call for restoration of order, even if it means little to no further reforms from the administration.

But it also comes at enormous risk. First, it is unclear how protesters will react. They might create their own anti-looters protection squads. The last thing the country needs are running battles among civilians in the streets during protests (there are credible reports that politicians allied to the administration are sponsoring some of the looting to discredit protesters). Second, police inaction has been met by organized civilian protection squads in parts of Nairobi and elsewhere. Should the protests persist, these entities will likely acquire a life of their own and pose future challenges to state power and authority. Finally, the cynicism of an administration unleashing violence on its own people will only further erode government legitimacy.

In my view, the question of legitimacy is core to the Ruto administration’s current political problems. It is fair to say that he entered office with a significant deficit of legitimacy. He was party to Kenyatta’s economic mismanagement, having personally been implicated in several scandals as Deputy President. Before that he had been indicted by the ICC for allegedly mobilizing murderous ethnic militias during the 2007-08 post-election violence (the case collapsed, in no small part, because witnesses kept disappearing or turning up dead). And even before that he had a raft of corruption scandals to his name and a reputation for political shadiness going back to the 1990s.

To be fair, Ruto is not an atypical Kenyan politician. Neither is he a 21st century reincarnation of Daniel arap Moi, as his detractors like to say. For example, Kenyatta, too, was an ICC indictee for the same alleged crimes and has loads of corruption scandals to his name. The difference is that, as an outsider, he dared challenge the establishment and win. For that reason, he faces a higher level of scrutiny than would be the case were he from a different