The spin doctors at State House seem oblivious of Aesop's fable about the North wind and the sun quarreling over which of them could strip a traveller of his coat. The wind, certain that brute force settles all arguments, huffed and battered and howled, and the traveller only clutched his garment tighter.
The sun, while saying nothing dramatic at all, simply warmed the afternoon until the traveller removed his coat. Today, Kenya is watching its own version of that fable play out in the open, and the presidency has cast itself, with surprising gusto, as the North wind.
Evidence of the huffing abounds. Senator Edwin Sifuna floated a proposal on police housing, and the Head of State did not answer with a memorandum. Instead, he responded by calling grown men "fools" who "have no capacity to discuss housing". A chicken was invoked by the Opposition, mischievously, about a twelfth-floor coop, and the Commander-in-Chief took the bait with the solemnity of a man defending the republic's honour.
A mining licence dispute in Magadi, rather than produce a policy brief, brought up the phrase "Linda Sponsor", a coinage that did more for the Opposition's talking points than any op-ed could.
Retired President Uhuru Kenyatta later appropriated the ‘Sponyo’ label, turning the joke on Ruto. One does not need to be a student of Goebbels to see what is problematic here, though it was George Orwell, not Goebbels, who observed that "political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable", and that political speech, at its most desperate, "consists largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness".
What comes out of Kenya's ruling class today is neither cloudy nor vague. Sadly, it is loud, messy and personal, and this is what should worry State House strategists more than the insults themselves, which are endlessly quotable by the very people they are meant to silence. There is a little joke buried in all this; a government that has built 20,000 houses, 130,000 more under construction, and 600 markets to its name keeps losing the argument to a senator standing on a flatbed truck.
Wanjiku will not vote based on square footage. She will vote based on whether the man asking for her vote sounds like he respects her enough to disagree with her politely. Every "you have no capacity", every "akili yenu haiwezi fika," chips at that respect a little more, and no housing statistic has yet been invented that could repair a bruised ego on Kenyans' behalf.
There is the accusation, dutifully recycled by the Senate Majority Leader, that Uhuru is bankrolling Linda Mwananchi; a claim offered with great confidence but, so far, not a single proof. Bottom-up economics promised Kenyans a nation of self-made hustlers, yet faced with a movement thriving from the ground up, the government's reflex is curiously to declare those very hustlers mere puppets on somebody's string.
If Linda Mwananchi is indeed Uhuru's marionette as repeatedly alleged, the strings are remarkably well hidden. If it is not, the accusation will simply harden into one more entry on the growing list of things the government said under pressure but could not prove.
And then there are the bloggers, the Hustler Nation Intelligence Bureau and its Sh500,000-a-month inducement, talked about and occasionally confirmed by the very woman it tried to recruit. A propaganda operation that cannot keep its own payroll off the record is not a machine. It is a rumour mill adorned in government colours, and rumour mills have never once won an election on anyone's behalf.
None of this, however, means Linda Mwananchi is destined for the State House. Opposition movements have flattered themselves into irrelevance before, and Kenya's political memory is littered with insurgencies that mistook a good rally for a governing mandate.
The sun and wind fable has a moral worth restating: Force invites resistance, warmth invites surrender. Until the presidency learns the difference between the two, it will keep mistaking its own bluster for strength, and keep handing its critics, free of charge, the very soundbites that undress it.
