Ruto unmoved by public outcry

We all know about Rachel Ruto and her eccentric Christian piety, but what of William Ruto himself?

Are we supposed to believe that a man who advocates shooting his opponents, who is unmoved by scenes of armed mobs striding in his name towards murder and mayhem, who has presided over many ‘disappearances’, and who is unresponsive to bitter, economic hardship across the country, is a Christian?

We see him at church services turning his back, holding a handkerchief to his supposedly streaming eyes. But his back is turned because there are no tears. This is exaggerated, performative Christianity, with no sincerity.

There is no empirical evidence that Ruto subscribes to any Christian principles or values at all. His blatant disregard for the safety and rights of other people, coupled with an extreme lack of empathy for suffering, and zero remorse, are attitudes totally remote from any tenets of Christianity.

Between his performances and the zealotry of his wife, set against the dire situation on the ground regarding security, education, health, and the whole gamut of services that the government should be, but isn’t, providing, it is no wonder that many people are confused.

Because the one thing William Ruto does well is pretend. He can act a good act, talk a good talk, and be very convincing, even in the face of contrary evidence. He has long used the ‘Christian’ pose to his advantage, but even church leaders are slowly waking to the horrors of this government and have begun criticising its excesses and criminal acts.

Perhaps as a result we might soon be seeing some major announcements about ‘development’ prioritising the Muslim population. Because Ruto never misses a trick. And that is all his promises are. A trick.

He promised a bottom-up economy during his 2022 campaign. Utter betrayal followed as he engaged in a gluttonous personal lifestyle with off-the-scale expenditure on grandiose personal projects, spending billions glamorising State House (shades of Donald Trump and the obscenely gilded Oval Office), while jetsetting around the world at phenomenal public expense, seeking more people to sweet-talk and hoodwink.

Careless of our national sovereignty, he recently sold us to France, a country reputedly involved in more than 20 assassinations of African leaders, from Lumumba to Gaddafi, and expelled from most of its former colonies for its neocolonial interference.

Unwanted elsewhere in Africa, France turns to Kenya to increase its ‘soft power’ and spread its markets across the continent, and Ruto eagerly agrees to co-operate, having negotiated who-knows-what kind of Faustian bargain.

Ruto is in a deep financial hole because he has borrowed beyond imagining and can’t meet the bills except by selling things off. As such, he is a prime target for expansionist foreign countries, especially since being named in 2024-2025 by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as the most corrupt leader in Africa, and the second most corrupt in the world.

Ruto shrugs off such deeply shameful accolades. A sense of shame is entirely missing in malignant narcissism, whose core characteristics include the grandiosity Ruto consistently displays, with his inflated sense of self-importance and intense need for power and control.

We recently heard from former Central Bank governor Njuguna Ndung’u about Ruto’s totalitarian behaviour, controlling every aspect of establishment activity. We also heard from Rigathi Gachagua, who said he had observed Cabinet secretaries trembling with fear in Ruto’s presence.

This is clear evidence of coercive control, and it means that Ruto has a free hand with all his borrowing and spending, without any scrutiny or checks. The people who should check him tremble in his presence. They dare not offer an opinion.

Our Cabinet and parliament currently have no constructive function. In their fear and trembling, members render themselves superfluous rubber-stampers, shamefully facilitating that which destroys other people’s lives. Karma is surely on its way.

Ruto meanwhile is looking for every big and little thing he can sell – airports, communications services, ports – because the country is in so much unresolvable debt and also because he needs both a war chest and the means to sustain his lavish lifestyle.

As our other ‘leaders’ stand impotently to the side, his grand house sale includes shedding our national assets, because ‘they are not thriving’. Of course they are not thriving. They are blighted by all-pervasive corruption. But the corrupt cannot investigate the corrupt. And privatisation offers all kinds of opportunities.

He’s raiding everything, from payslips to Saccos, while introducing different sources of funds-manipulation, from the Sovereign Wealth Fund to the National Infrastructure Fund to the Housing Levy to the Social Health Authority to the National Transport and Safety Authority’s automated instant traffic fine system.

Now he is reportedly eyeing pension funds to build a trillion-shilling underground railway. In a famous UK case, media tycoon Robert Maxwell (father of the imprisoned Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell) propped up his failing business empire by plundering its pension funds. Then one day he disappeared off his boat, his body later found floating in the ocean. He left tens of thousands of pension-holders facing financial ruin. That’s what happens when you gorge on pension money that belongs to other people. Ultimately, for some, there is no way out except oblivion.

As Ruto ravenously identifies these new sources of money, he continues building shiny things the country cannot afford, and calling it development. It is not development. It is the dream of a village chicken-seller who came to public notice as a goon in a suit (YK’92 goons all wore suits) and who now dons a more expensive suit to travel abroad and see shiny things in other countries.

Despite the thin veneer of sophistication he has acquired, Ruto has no fundamental understanding of the process of development that lies behind all he sees in other countries, but he eyes their shiny edifices greedily and covetously. He wants some of that stuff, and quickly. So back home he embarks on projects that are big and flashy, regardless of the fact that they offer little benefit to the majority of people.

He references countries like Vietnam as models of development, but fails to understand that a developing country must first establish robust legal protections, transparent governance and a universal basic infrastructure before inviting foreign investment. These core prerequisites ensure the nation actually benefits from incoming capital rather than facing exploitation and spiralling corruption.

This all goes over the delusional Ruto’s head. Or perhaps he doesn’t care. In his rapacious greed for power and money, he thinks he can skip those building blocks. He thinks a few scattered shiny things will make Kenya into a first-world country, so he goes ahead with his vanity projects, as if a bunch of stadiums where 90 per cent of a semi-starving population will never set foot is exactly what this country needs.

At core, Rachel and Ruto are simple village folk, probably almost unable to believe their luck as they thoroughly exploit and enjoy the trappings of a different kind of life. One of them speaks in tongues and the other is endowed with the gift of the gab that has got them to where they are. But when you scratch the surface, there is no substance behind it.

If there was, we would not be in a situation where very many people have no water, no electricity, no medical services and insufficient food, and can’t afford to send their children to school. Many rural schools are just dirt floors, with rocks for chairs and a rough roof of reeds. There are no books, certainly no tablets, and ultimately no chance at all for those innocently hopeful young children. It is heartbreaking.

Is Ruto so tone-deaf to all this that he thinks people will now react positively to one of his most ridiculous promises ever – free education at the tertiary level? He said parents would be free to pay for their children’s university education “if they want to”. Who pays because “they want to”? If not, the government will pay. With what, may we ask? This is the same government that can’t provide adequate school capitation.

And what about the 80 per cent of students who never make it to university? What is the plan for them? What about all those who do graduate but then find there are no jobs, so they are forced to join the ranks of those already dealing with dehumanising poverty?

But the logistics of real life, the way people live and raise their families, are none of Ruto’s concern. He simply continues making ever-rasher promises, mesmerised by words like ‘billion’ and ‘trillion’ and magical six-month timeframes. 

His inflated sense of self-importance leads him to think he has the moral authority to spearhead Kenya’s future – an assumption that obviously lay behind his decision to deliver a strategically timed ‘state of the nation’ address recently, along with news of a new 30-year development plan.

Once again, Gachagua had stolen a march on the announcement by leaking its details, which left Ruto simmering with barely concealed anger and unable to deal with press questions. He scurried back into State House, looking haggard, humiliated and defeated. He knows he is hated nationwide. That is a big burden to bear, even if it is of his own making. I almost felt sorry for him.

Then, as he walked towards the door, I noticed the soles of his shoes. They were bright red, the trademark colour of designer Christian Louboutin’s shoes, which retail at around sh.175,000 per pair. 

Ruto was probably also wearing one of the five big-name designer watches he owns, whose purchase prices together add up to more than sh.27 million. And perhaps also his Stefano Ricci crocodile leather belt (sh.425,000), and one of his silk shirts (sh.182,000).

Just a few wardrobe details, but they add up to enough to fund 15 rural dispensaries for an entire year. These few ornaments are a tiny fraction of the evidence of Ruto’s staggering extravagance in an opulent billionaire lifestyle.

I reined in my misplaced sympathy and wondered instead how a man who had responded to GenZ’s message with guns and abductions had the cheek to appear before us talking about a “national conversation”.

I wondered how he could speak so airily of Kenya’s long-term transformation, when more than 45 per cent of the population faces severe economic strain, living below the international poverty line and grappling daily with high food and transport costs. Millions don’t know how they will get through tomorrow, never mind the next 35 years.

No one is denying the need for forward planning with lofty and achievable objectives. And Ruto might have employed the best brains to work on the plan. But he himself should be the last person to take credit for it, or to be in any way involved in its implementation, especially given the fate of Vision 2030.

He nonchalantly admitted that Vision 2030 has failed to even approach its targets, but of course he omitted to mention that for 13 of the 18 years since Vision 2030 was launched in 2008, he himself has been at the centre of power, either as deputy-president or as president. The failure is all his. He has happily presided over the nation’s fast-growing inequality, watching as it completely outpaces national economic growth.

He has no clue how to change this, no notion of how to build stable foundations where people and businesses can grow. He does not understand cause and effect, or the principle of the building-blocks of a prosperous nation – fair laws, a safe society, honest leaders. And he has no interest in these things. The announcement of the new plan was nothing more to him than a calculated part of a campaign agenda.

This continuing attempt by Ruto to hide his litany of failures behind expansive promises shows a serious disconnect from reality, something that will become ever more significant as it pushes him towards the nadir of his crumbling career.

But he might not always have to stoop to weeping in church. If there is any justice in this world, the time is fast approaching when he might find he has something altogether more real to weep about.