Ruto's vision of future blighted by nationwide blackout and 'pandisa'

Right from the start, this was bound to end badly. You don’t interrupt Kenyans on a random night, so close to month-end, to tell them nothing in lofty English and pandisa. The latter means conflation, a technique that Prezzo Bill Ruto finds irresistible, even when it’s completely unnecessary.

Without any sense of irony, when Prezzo Ruto took to the podium last week to launch something called “Vision 2060,” it was against the backdrop of a nation-wide blackout, perhaps because his eyes can see in the dark.  He speechified about a national dialogue that he characterised as the most consequential since the beginning of time.

No, he didn’t launch the document, actually; he was inviting the nation to a “conversation” about Vision 2060, which is scheduled for some time next week, somewhere in this big city, and those invited do not include you and I.

The reason for the latter, if I correctly heard Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o, the Kisumu Governor and one of the architects of the blueprint, not all of us can comprehend the contents of the document. I must admit there were many things that I didn’t comprehend about the good prof, when he appeared on Citizen TV. He was visibly irritated—and who wouldn’t, if asked to defend nonsense on national television—even evasive and condescending, to simple, common-sense questions by his interlocutor.

Let me clarify Vision 2060 is nonsensical as Kenyans have witnessed the desecration of their nationhood over the last four years. Major policy shifts were delivered by Prezzo Ruto on top of an SUV—he overruns institutions, charged former Central Bank Governor, Njuguna Ndung’u, another professor, no less— and who understands a thing or two about those complex economic issues better than you and I.

Many of Prezzo Ruto’s roadside declarations often ended in court, and they’d canvassed in the people’s court, on top of self-same contraption, and ratified without so much as a pretence about securing Kenyans’ consensus. Reason, they were mostly meant to fill up a few tumbocrats.

So, when Prezzo Ruto disembarks from his SUV and mobilises his buddies to a townhouse to deliberate on the future of this nation, 30 years on, Kenyans are inclined to pose: why the sudden change of heart? Why not proceed as he has for the last four years, riding roughshod over 55 million Kenyans?

Well, Prezzo Ruto has responded by claiming: a) he takes full responsibility for his decisions, b) he knows what he’s doing, c) he’s not mwenda wazimu and d) his critics don’t have akili.

One way of putting those theories to the test is to “triangulate”—here we’re using academic lingo that Prof Nyong’o and others can relate to—higher education funding models that suggest the government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

First off, they disrupted what had been in place for 60 years to impose what they called Means Testing Instrument, some abracadabra that’s purported to accurately predict one’s need level (and scholarship support) based on declared incomes.

But since the backbone of our economy is jua kali, and tax payment isn’t fool-proof, this means a wholesaler at Nyamakima is likely to declare less income than a manual labourer at a factory, and the trader’s son is likely to receive a higher scholarship from the government, despite enjoying a much higher income.

Weeks ago, Prezzo Ruto took to the podium to claim, without admitting failure, that a new need-blind programme would be unveiled. This man is so fond of launching new things! Consequently, every student would be guaranteed to pursue education without financial encumbrance because his government would ensure that.

Well, not so fast, said the technocrats. This week, they said students would be advanced loans, not grants, all recovered upon graduation and securing employment, blab blah blah.

What’s evident is that Kenyans’ beef with the new blueprint isn’t the document per see, it’s the trust deficit with Prezzo Ruto. His push for dialogue, by fire by force, only fortifies entrenched prejudice that he’s leading Kenyans down the garden path.