Why President Ruto is blaming foreigners

President William Ruto [File]

It is low class xenophobia from the apex. The scandal is that a human being crosses a border carrying nothing but his labour. He accepts work that nobody else wants. He earns very little, and lives precariously. Yet, he is made to feel guilty. His offence is he was born on the wrong side of an imaginary line.

This is one of the abiding lessons from the presidential directive on foreign groundlings who scratch the Kenyan earth for a living. They live in squalor, in flying toilet environments. They clean public toilets for a pittance. They work on construction sites, hawk tea and sell roast maize at street corners. They are immigrants from Kenya’s neighbouring countries.

They are not here because they love menial jobs that nobody wants. They would sooner be in their own homeland; in dignified jobs that furnish comfortable lifestyles. But such is life. Social and political dynamics in Africa make us exiles in other people’s homes. When you are African in Africa, you live in your home country one day at a time.

The continent’s political precarity has marked each one of us with the stamp of “potential exile.” From the high and mighty, like Mobutu Sese Seko, Milton Obote, Idi Amin, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Yahya Jammeh, to Burundian pit latrine cleaners in the slums of Nairobi, every African counts one day at a time. You spend this night in State House, and the next in the uncertainty of exile, next door. It must disturb men and women of conscience when the person at the very top of the hierarchy in an African nation wakes up one morning to issue a stentorian edict to the lowest of the low, to pack up and leave. Their sin is doing work that nobody wants.

When the most powerful person profiles the powerless as an enemy, we must ask who will benefit from the dynamic. The answer is, those who can convert economic anxiety into political dividend. The Ruto regime is struggling to answer difficult questions about unemployment, cost of living, corruption, and distribution of opportunities. Lowly foreigners are a convenient diversion.

Even as he knows that he is not telling the truth about fulfilling his 2022 election promises, President William Ruto is imagining easy ways to gain popularity. For, he cannot show what he has done for the voter, beyond performance declaratives. Accordingly, he shifts the challenge from structural unemployment to the poor foreigner. He is giving a face to the poor Kenyan’s misery. 

A Congolese hawker is visible, especially to his poor Kenyan neighbour. A bad monetary policy is less easy to recognise, unless you understand the Finance Bill. A poor Somali hawker in Eastleigh is easy to raid. A financial malfeasance at the National Treasury is difficult to dramatise. Scapegoating is easy and politically efficient. Once the public personalises the problem as the toilet cleaner from Burundi, and the hawker from Congo, it forgets about President Ruto’s five-pillared bottom up economic transformational PLAN.

President Ruto’s edict to low-class foreigners is performance politics; pure political theatre, whose consequences were not thought through beforehand. Unable to explain why Kenyans have no jobs, State House chose to give the lazy answer, “It is because foreigners have taken your jobs.” This lazy answer forgets that Kenyans are everywhere in East Africa, from Malaba and Namanga, all the way to Yambio, Nadapal and Juba, pushing wheelbarrows and handcarts with tomatoes and linen.

It is saddening that some Kenyans rose to the ruse of “foreigners must go” to accost unfortunate foreigners, who are visibly in destitution. Hopefully, common sense and wise counsel will prevail. Kenyans should leave these people alone. They are not our problem. Our problem is our fallen rule of law, as Edwin Sifuna keeps reminding us.

The poor fellows we are terrorising did not arrive in private jets from Zimbabwe, to acquire banks, or smuggle gold. They are not here to illegally take up bloated tenders to construct airports and shoddy dual carriageways. Nor are they here to illegally excise 15,000 acres of land in Mt Elgon Forest, Turbo Forest, South Nandi Forest, or Kakamega Forest. 

They are not involved with skewed tenders in medical supplies, nor are they irregularly supplying police uniforms. Their families are not involved with bogus supplies of books to schools, or road construction optics in Nairobi. No, we are our own problem. And if we do not stop our politics of “Hawana akili,” and “We shall stuff ballot boxes,” we will soon be cleaning toilets in Bujumbura.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke