Why scientists Magufuli and Ruto are joined at the hip politically

The disconnect between the disciplined mind of the scholar, and the discretionary power of the politician has been at work again. On Tuesday, President William Ruto commissioned the building of four tourist hotels in Tsavo National Park. He replayed the contradictory tensions between the politician and the scholar, resident in the self-same individual. 

Ruto, like the late John Magufuli of Tanzania, is an academic whose activities are often in disharmony with his training and qualifications.

The high-end hotels that he has launched in the park will leave observers wondering about the gap between his professed concern for the environment, on the one hand, and his focus on commerce on the other.  

In the midterm of his joint second season in office with President Uhuru Kenyatta, Ruto surprised the world with the award of a PhD degree in Botany by the University of Nairobi.

Apparently, Ruto had all along been working on a thesis, titled “Influence of human activities on land use changes on environmental quality of riparian ecosystems: A case study of Saiwa Swamp watershed, Western Kenya”. 

The President’s work is a tour de force in scholarly studies on human activities and land use changes on the environment of the Saiwa Swamp watershed.

As a factor of this study, Ruto is one of the foremost botanists in the country. The expectation, accordingly, will be that he would intensify public awareness, and his own personal focus on conservation of Kenya’s shrinking natural environment. Indeed, early in his presidency, Ruto launched the on-again-off-again five billion tree planting project.  

Hotel rooms

The last thing environmentalists, who have previously hailed him as a champion of the cause, will expect is for Ruto to hail the cost of hotel rooms in Tsavo.

They don’t expect him to praise investments that are set to degrade the park, least of all to drive them. Expert opinion has it that the construction will degrade the Tsavo ecosystem by at least 50 square kilometres around each of the four hotels. Why the contradiction between learning and practice? 

Yet, the tensions between the bookish academic as a theorist and the pragmatic political operative is not anything new. Nor is it a William Ruto oddity.

Political leaders often boast of advanced degrees. Some are genuinely achieved. Others have been obtained performatively. It doesn’t matter. Both categories soon demonstrate that politics and scholarship can be two very opposed affairs.

Where academia operates on the platform of values, politics is about optics. The scholar thinks about the long term impact of decisions about to be made. The politician thinks about the impression about to be made — visibility.  

The scholar focuses on long-term reasoning. The politician wants immediate returns, fully-loaded with sugar-coated narratives.

Is the ethos of Ruto’s rigorous inquiry at the University of Nairobi gathering dust in the campus shelves, while reality directs him to do the opposite of his research findings and recommendations? Has the disciplined scholar become a virtue-signalling salesman at the common political market? 

Human intrusion

From being the champion of preservation of fragile ecosystems, Ruto is now the lead anthropogenic driver of environmental degradation. He is leading human intrusion into Tsavo National Park, completely oblivious of the cost of human intrusion into the park. The returns from the hotel room overrides the cost of environmental degradation.  

These contradictions are exacerbated by the fact that Nairobi was at the same time hosting a global meeting on environmental protection. National priorities are standing on their head; the legs are flying in the air. 

President Magufuli did the same in Tanzania, during the Covid-19 season. Many believe that the ultimate price was his own surrender to the pandemic.

Here was Tanzania’s man of power; a leading chemist, with a doctorate in the discipline.  This researcher should have known better, yet he rejected science. Magufuli scoffed at epidemiological findings on the virulent virus.

He said that he would overcome Covid-19 with the power of prayer. His scepticism was a populist political tool. It failed fatally, when he rejected the most basic public health advise.  

Ruto and Magufuli are joined at the hip of choice of spectacle over substance. It is a choice in which optic defeats expertise. For, in President Ruto’s case, the First World development (that is now his pet subject) will be measured not ecologically, but politically. In the short-term, the hotels will bring jobs and economic statistics. These are bankable assets, unlike natural environments that, at first sight, are only jungles. Nobody banks a jungle; this must be the reasoning.   

Ruto is looking at the 2027 election. While, as a leading botanist,  he is acutely aware of the irreversible environmental degradation that his Tuesday activities will lead to, he also knows that it will not happen overnight. It will creep over the park like leprosy. When the moment of truth finally arrives, he will have left the stage. For now, accordingly, Ruto has elected to close the ranks with elite investment networks. They gain not from protection, but rather from extraction and exploitation. 

Academic ideals

Must it always be like this? Mwalimu Nyerere of Tanzania was certainly a different kind of scholar and politician. He governed his country in line with his academic ideals. His moral philosophy interpreted itself in action. While his Ujamaa philosophy eventually failed in practice, its intellectual centre held solidly. And its ultimate failure was never a factor of contradictions in what he had learned and believed in –  on the one hand —  and what he practised on the other.  

In Ruto, however, Kenya has a leader whose academic credentials cannot fit in the same pigeonhole with his political ambitions. Mwalimu Nyerere allowed philosophy to rule power. Ruto allows political power to subdue philosophy. Nyerere often spoke of education for self-reliance.

Education was a tool to uproot people from poverty. Ruto sees education as a credential. It is a lapel badge that reads, “I have a PhD” a trophy to be placed on the shelves for visitors to admire. Beyond that, it has no functional value.  

In this regard, another interesting contrast is that between Presidents Ruto and Paul Kagame of Rwanda

Does Kagame behave like a scholar without a PhD, while Ruto behaves like a politician despite a PhD?

Ruto is a man of symbols, spectacles, and narratives, such as those he wove on Jamhuri Day. He is in his element when launching, and sometimes relaunching the same, projects and telling tall stories.   

On the other hand, Kagame, the scholar without a PhD, bases his leadership on statistics, facts and scientific evidence. Kagame is a man of data, more data, targets, and performance metrics. Ruto, in contrast, is a person of visibility, talk, and make-believe. Both Ruto and Kagame talk of modernisation. Kagame’s modernisation focus is evidence-based, with emphasis on discipline. Ruto’s focus is a sugar-candy-mountain happiness affair.  

When education and qualifications and public office do not seem to have any useful intersection at the very top of both educational achievement and office, do we need to question the wider relevance of learning?

What is the point of pursuing a PhD in Botany, for example? What is the worth of making policy recommendations, and yet when you get to occupy the highest office where policy decisions are made, you throw your own recommendations into the dustbin?   

Ruto comes across as a degreed populist. Yes, he is learned, and very articulate. However, he governs based not on his high learning, but on the political calculus of the day. If university degrees do not guide governance, even when the holders are the ones who govern, what do they count for? Is a new educational ethos urgently required?   

As it is, Kenya’s President is among the finest models of the futility of an education that adds little to overall social good. He demonstrates that although thought and conscience may live together in the academy, the only things that count in State House are power and opportunities.  

In this, does President Ruto begin to closely mirror Ferdinand Marcos, who was the President of The Philippines from 1965 to 1986? Marcos showed with surgical clarity  what happens when intelligence and power intersect without conscience. The Filipino lawyer rose to prominence in the third decade of the Cold War. He was brilliant, charismatic and eloquent.  

Educated individual

Like Ruto, Marcos claimed that he was a man on a mission, to develop his country and people. Like Ruto, again, Marcos was an educated individual. He rose to the highest office in The Philippines at the same time as Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, following the withdrawal of Singapore from the Federation of Malaya, and independence in 1965.

Unlike Marcos, Lee built an iconic State that has become President Ruto’s point of reference, even as Kenya steadily gravitates towards Marcos’s looted Filipino state.  

Despite his gift of oratory and stage presence, like Ruto, Marcos had the fundamental flaw of treating knowledge and eloquence as tools of dominance. When you have listened to Ruto addressing the Kenyan nation during Jamhuri Day celebrations, you must be wowed by his gift of the garb. This man is a skilled rhetorician. He fires from the hip. And yet, does he only use his rhetoric to build castles in the air? When you have seen the intersection between the Kenyan national Executive and the Legislature, do you witness President Ruto, like Marcos, aggressively centralising power, despite decongestion of power by the Constitution? 

President Ruto forgets not just what he learned in the academies, but also what he promised the people during the campaign for office.

In the case of Marcos, there was the additional conflation of the State with the family and cronies. They did not know where to draw the line between the government and the family. And they used their privileged family place in the public domain to plunder the public coffers.  

Hopefully, Ruto will want to consciously steer away from similar conflation that could lead to similar plunder of his country’s coffers by his family and friends. Hopefully, too, his family and friends will have no interest in the four hotels that are coming up in Tsavo. He will not, like Marcos, undermine institutions for personal and family gain. 

 Kenyans are at the time of writing this article were concerned about a mysterious deal that their government has signed with the US in the health sector.  

They are puzzled that the President and his Prime Cabinet Secretary who doubles up as the Foreign CS, Musalia Mudavadi, get visibly worked up when legitimate questions are raised.

The $1.64 billion agreement with the US pertains to funding of Kenya’s universal healthcare. Procedurally, there should have been open public participation, and debate in Parliament.

Even as President Ruto aspires to make Kenya a First World country, Kenyans will be on the lookout against institutional rot, and  crony capitalism in investments. They will want to know, for example,  that Tsavo is not about cronyism.

In a word, they will be on guard against the danger of academic brilliance that is not balanced with moral and ethical values. They will, instead, want to see a lot of Lee Kwan Yew in Ruto, now that Lee’s Singapore is Ruto’s role model. 

Lee, a lawyer like Marcos, was ruthlessly honest about social conduct. He believed in justification of power through public-spirited results, and not for cronyism. His strong State was strictly governed by rules.

Singapore’s harsh laws applied to everyone, without exception. Lee led by personal example, hence completely eradicated corruption, even among his friends, political allies, and family.  

The reality

If President Ruto’s is cast between Marcos and Lee, it slants more towards Marcos. The dream is about Lee; Marcos the reality. Development in Kenya is a futuristic spectacle, couched in lengthy promissory speeches. Where Lee governed through institutions, Ruto mystifies through futuristic charismatic allusions.  

In the end, Kenya finds herself at the point where thought and high learning must interact with conscience. If they will serve ambition, the Kenyan State will consume the nation and eventually consume itself.

The example of tourist hotels in Tsavo is an expose of ambition overriding not just learning, but common sense. Ruto has placed the cart before the horse, and faith before logic and reality. In the process, the PhD in Botany has become insignificant in the face of the choices made by the State.

Kenya needs fewer speeches, less charisma, more reflection and restraint, and more public spirited action, with less promising.  

 Dr Barrack Muluka is a strategic communications adviser