Ethnic profiling ahead of 2027 race will take Kenya down the 2007 path

President William Ruto.[File, Standard]

Life always invites us to show growth and development. We must especially demonstrate that we have taken lessons from the past. In 2007, Kenya made ethnicity the election question. Nineteen years later, the country seems to be positioning itself in the same manner.

The big guns in government are in the lead. They refuse to demonstrate growth. President William Ruto landed in Mombasa from overseas travels in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan a few days ago, to resume his campaign assignments on the Coast. The campaigns are themed around the question of tribes and tribalism.  

Earlier in the week, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen suggested that the public sector transport strike on Monday and Tuesday was instigated by “tribalists.” These people also “do not support the government. He appealed to them and to the public transport sector to “support President Ruto the same way you supported President Uhuru Kenyatta.” 

Both the effort and its objectives are clear. The Ruto 2027 message is about mobilising the Kenyan nation against one community. It is the same community that ODM mobilised against in 2007.

The outcome, as the world knows, was disastrous. Yet, when the political establishment has run out of plausible messaging, the temptation to isolate and demonise a community can be exciting.  

It is a dangerous ideology that brought Rwanda to its knees in 1994, with nearly 10,000 people being killed every day, over 100 days. The figure is a mind-boggler.

It means everything else in the country stopped. The only assignment left was to hunt down, find, and kill. And Kenya was going the same way in 2008, until global Good Samaritans intervened.  

Growth and development would dictate that we show that we took lessons from that season, whatever our positions may have been. Indeed, the amity that Ruto forged with Uhuru in the lead-up to the 2013 elections suggested that the politics of negative ethnicity were dead and buried. Both leaders campaigned with the mantra of “Never Again.” 

Accordingly, it should concern the Kenyan nation and the rest of the world when the government of the day begins framing the 2027 elections around negative ethnicity. Any attempt at mobilisation of that kind needs to be called out boldly, loudly, and clearly. 

Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale has also been in the Rift Valley, giving sinister ethnic signals. “You, the people of Rift Valley, we have worked with you before,” he told a public gathering, “Those tribalists should not play with us. You know me. You know that I don’t joke,” Duale said. 

This is ethnic profiling and signaling. In what context of “being known” was the CS talking about? The Philip Waki Commission Report of 2008 is a repository of blood-curdling and pithy reminders of what can happen when the seeds of ethnic hate have germinated in a people’s mind.

People see others not as fellow citizens, or even human beings, but as weeds and other unwanted materials that should be removed and destroyed. 

The Waki Commission traces the historical roots of what blossomed into the 2007/08 post-election violence. Narratives of the kind Kenya is beginning to hear from President Ruto’s broad-based government abound.

They are narratives of hate. It appears that everyone who questions anything about this government “hates the government.” And they “hate” it because of the tribal considerations.  

Governments are not constituted so that people should love or hate them. They exist to serve the people. That includes the Kenyan Kwanza government.

Whenever there is anything praiseworthy, Kenyans should praise it, regardless of ethnic considerations. Conversely, whenever there is anything anyone does not agree with, they should be free to question it without being blackmailed with ethnic slurs.  

In the end, this government should survive or lose next year’s presidential election not because the President is from a certain tribe, but because of performance merits and demerits.

The optic today is that this Presidency must enjoy a second term by hook or crook. If it will take spreading ethnic based fears and hatreds, it would seem, then so be it.  

It should never be that way. President Ruto now faces the ultimate test for national leadership. He is called upon to demonstrate that the Kenyan nation is greater than any one individual’s personal interests. They begin with his.

That was why he took the oath of office: to protect and defend the Constitution. It is mostly against himself that he must protect the supreme law of the land, and the rule of law generally. He must end this dangerous ethnic profiling. It begins with him.  

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser