Ruto the Flying Mantis Has Been Grounded

Ruto’s wings have been clipped and we are watching over him carefully, monitoring all his movements. Until he surrenders.

August, 2024
 

When we were children, my friends and I loved hanging out every evening after school on the grass field near our homes. With our backs bent over the ground as if in harvest, passers-by would have been forgiven for mistaking us for wheat farmers. Well, we were actually in the process of harvesting, not plants but grasshoppers.

Once we got our hands on the grasshoppers, the first thing we would do was to pluck off their powerful hind legs, preventing them from leaping around, taking them hostage. We’d place them inside plastic containers with blades of grass for food but inevitably, after a few hours – or, rarely, days – we’d lose them, never to see them again. And then we’d go out to hunt for more.

The predicament currently facing our president, William Ruto, brought these days of my childhood to mind. If I were to compare William Ruto to an insect, then he would be a praying mantis (and not a grasshopper). Why? Because he’s always jumping around from one country to another, his hands held together, not in prayer but, like his predecessor, begging.

In the 20 months during which Ruto has been president, he has travelled 64 times to 38 different countries. At this rate, he will have travelled a record 186 times to 114 countries by the end of his 5-year term. If Pitbull thought he was Mr Worldwide, then Ruto is Mr Solar System.

Ruto’s list of international trips is so huge that he has a Wikipedia page dedicated to them: He made 10 trips in the four months following his election as president in 2022, 34 trips in 2023 and 20 trips in the first six months of 2024. Ruto has, on occasion, spent at least one out of every five days abroad. Some of these trips were quite unnecessary, and made us question why the heck Ruto appointed ambassadors if he was going to do their work. You see, in the previous administrations, William Ruto only ever served as the Minister for Home Affairs, then as Minister for Agriculture (where he was implicated in a maize scandal), and finally as Minister for Higher Education (where he was suspended over a KSh272 million fraud case).

His biggest dream, after all, was to be Minister for Foreign Affairs, and since it was never fulfilled, he’s making up for it now. Or, as Eddy Ashioya says,

“It sometimes seems like he doesn’t believe that he is president; it sounds like what kids do when they’re trying to figure it out before they get a real job. And sometimes it feels like he just became president to live his wildest dreams.”

The cost of Ruto’s foreign trips has been insane. He spent KSh681 million [£4 million, £1 = Ksh170] in the first nine months of his presidency, 213 per cent of the amount former president Uhuru Kenyatta used during a similar period of his presidency. This spending has taken place in the face of the government’s inability to deliver basic services such as education and healthcare.

When questioned about the reason behind the trips, Ruto would brush off critics, saying that he had gone to secure jobs for the youth of the country. He claimed to have secured 250,000 jobs in Germany for Kenyans, 350,000 jobs in Saudi Arabia, and before you could even do a quick Google search to confirm the veracity of these statements, he claimed that Apple had employed 23,000 Kenyans to work for them.

That of Apple’s 161,000 employees, 14% are from Kenya yet Kenyans themselves are unaware of this is quite baffling, to say the least. I mean, if Ruto must lie, then surely he should at least sprinkle his lies with a bit of sense; we are not fools to be “carried pumpkin”.

It’s been a year now since he made these pronouncements yet no one has seen these jobs. And even if they do exist, how does anyone get access to them if the immigration department will not process your passport unless you cough up a hefty bribe?

If the government hates us so much, they might as well just let us all leave. Because why else would Ruto and his government be complicit in the modern-day slave trade by selling us as labourers to other countries instead of creating employment opportunities in his own country? If he is unable to create a country that works for us, then he might as well pack up and leave office for, clearly, there are more competent people than he. It makes no sense to tell university graduates to set aside their educational certificates and go to Saudi Arabia to work as housemaids and drivers. The fact that they have even advertised these jobs on the National Employment Authority’s website is embarrassing.

Let us not forget his recent trip to the US. For this trip, rather than using the presidential plane, Harambee 1, he preferred to hire a private jet operated by Royal Jet of Dubai at a cost of KSh 2 million per hour and KSh200 million in total. As if that was not enough, Ruto took a huge entourage with him, and together they went to visit American comedians Steve Harvey and Tyler Perry (who said that he didn’t have time to come out and say hi). We were left wondering whether Ruto was travelling as our president or as a fan.

William Ruto’s extravagant trips have exposed his faux-Pan-Africanism. He once said,

“It is not intelligent for 54 African presidents to go and sit before one president from another country for a summit. Sometimes, we are mistreated. We are loaded onto buses like school kids. It is not right. The decision we have made as AU [the African Union] is that going forward, if there is going to be a discussion between Africa and any other country, we would send the chair and the bureau. That is the position I am taking as the president of Kenya.”

But immediately he received an invitation to attend the Italy-Africa summit in Rome, he jumped up like a kid and went, forgetting the statement he had made earlier. Ruto’s fellow African heads of state had snubbed the invite, leaving it to the AU Chair, but nonetheless, Ruto made his way there. Following this, he was accused of speaking from both sides of his mouth, an attestation to his greed.

It’s now slightly over a month since the protests started. Yet the president hasn’t left the country even once. “The country” is actually an overstatement; he has hardly left his house. The week after Kenyans stormed into Parliament, Ruto deployed security officers to guard his house, blockading the road leading to his residence for 500 metres in every direction. That Ruto was afraid of leaving his residence was without a doubt. That Ruto is currently afraid of leaving the country is quite evident. Why he hasn’t managed to do so, we know not. It could be that no country is willing to host a man with such levels of illegitimacy and dishonour in his own country. I mean, I wouldn’t dare host that man at my own place either.

In the past one month, so many events have happened internationally, which I’m sure the president would have loved to attend, but unfortunately, he has found himself in a predicament that grounds him at home. He would probably have visited Donald Trump following the attempt to assassinate him, but thankfully, he realised that he could send his regards via a tweet. His feet were probably itching to leave the country and attend Starmer’s first address as the UK’s new Prime Minister, but he had to travel via his fingers.

Ruto would probably have attended Paul Kagame’s swearing-in ceremony, but he realised that he could do this virtually. Heck! He even had a phone call with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (allegedly to negotiate the release of former Transport CS Kipchumba Murkomen who had been arrested in Dubai with US$210 million in his possession).

What we are sure of is that, following the recent protests, we the citizens of Kenya have finally caught Ruto like a grasshopper, plucked out his powerful hind legs, and locked him up in a plastic container. He has his own blades of grass in there, but he should be sure that we will not set him free. We will not misplace him. We will watch over him carefully, monitoring all his movements. Until he surrenders. Only then shall we heave a sigh of relief.

© Keith Ang’ana 2024 (writer from Kericho). Shared with author’s full permission
 

AW Kamau 2024