Agendas and lack of the same

A crowd at a political rally. [File, Standard]

There is nothing that makes a vanquished person appear more desperate than when he begins to shout wild insults at his competitors, like a child fighting a losing battle in the playground.

That’s what we’ve been treated to recently, as William Ruto grows ever more frustrated in the face of Kenyans’ mass rejection of him and his misrule of this country.

To be fair to him, except for a few – notably former deputy president Rigathi Gachagua and senator Edwin Sifuna – most opposition leaders at present seem far more preoccupied with jostling among themselves for personal position and self-preservation than with the future of the nation.

Ruto has dismissed the whole lot as having no alternative ideas or vision, and as being incapable, useless, “down kabisa”, lacking in constructive policies, relying on incitement and chaos, and being an “existential threat” – a danger to national life.

Most of these folk do have history involving significant allegations that they have somehow managed to shrug off, so they roll easily with these punches, and with Ruto’s other somewhat lame threats, such as “We will mess you up”, which is about as worrying as being hit with a wet cabbage leaf.

But Ruto has reserved his best invective for Sifuna, one of the few contestants with no apparent dubious history that needs to be sidestepped. Ruto’s distress arises because Sifuna has been rallying crowds of admirers in numbers never seen before (and I speak as a Raila diehard who has witnessed very many huge crowds over the years).

Sifuna’s campaign has become a juggernaut; it is difficult to stop, so he has been fielding from Ruto such disparaging barbs as ‘brainless’, ‘clueless’ (‘mfala’), ‘hopeless’, the puppet of a sponsor and a frequenter of witchdoctors.

Another word Ruto loves to wield like an insult is ‘agenda’. The way he puts it, he himself has a big one and Sifuna has none. 

Well, we have to agree there is nothing truer one can say about Ruto than that he has always had a big agenda, just not one designed to benefit Kenya.

Gachagua reported last week that Ruto had told him he intended to become richer than the wealthy former presidential families Kenyatta and Moi combined. It is an agenda Ruto has pursued relentlessly both before and since his 2022 election.

His stated agenda when he was running for office in 2022 was different. It involved ambitious, sweeping promises of reform, particularly for low-income citizens, whom he dubbed ‘hustlers’.

He pledged everything for them, from lower taxes to homes for squatters, zero-interest loans, free telephone calls and wifi, full electricity, and low prices on fuel and fertilisers and on such essentials as bread, flour and cooking gas. He particularly prioritised folk such as ‘mama mboga’ (vegetable vendors), boda boda (motorcycle taxi) riders and mkokoteni (pushcart) handlers, and promised to uplift ‘hustlers’ with a million new jobs annually.

He also promised an end to abductions and to borrowing, as well as accountability concerning public funds. And in the most cynical of all his promises, he stated his commitment to ending corruption: “The corrupt have only three [options]; they either [sic] relocate to another country, go to jail, or go to heaven,” he said.

But Ruto never had any intention of keeping any of those promises, particularly the one regarding corruption. He instead planned to take advantage of the destructive culture he had helped create, and to make the kind of money that until then had only existed in the fondest dreams of this former chicken seller.

Last October, Yahoo Finance named Ruto the eleventh richest leader among the world’s 195 countries. He was placed richer than Singapore prime minister Lawrence Wong, who was at number 15, three ahead of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, two ahead of Canada’s Mark Varney (formerly head of the Bank of England) and one ahead of France’s Emmanuel Macron – not to mention being richer than leaders of the Philippines, Malaysia and other places Ruto likes to quote when he talks about Kenya’s “missed opportunities”.

The only certain thing is that Ruto has missed no opportunity at all to loot and amass personal wealth to unbelievable levels, all from money belonging to the Kenyan nation.

Last month, the Mzalendo (‘Patriot’) Trust, a non-partisan monitoring organisation in Nairobi that tracks and reports on parliament’s activities, listed Ruto’s 254 promises. It enumerated and analysed each of them in detail, and found that Ruto had honoured just 25.

It’s little wonder that he has been attempting, with his 2060 tosh, to move the deadline 34 years on, having failed in his presidential term to fulfil even 10 per cent of what he promised. 

What was the value of his own agenda, then? Zero. It was all lies. He knew what his real plan was, even as he manufactured and voiced his mendacious promises.

Once elected, he lost no time in getting moving on his real agenda. The easiest way he could achieve his wealth ambition was to borrow as much money as possible, invest some of it in massive infrastructural projects that everyone could see and would be dazzled by, and therefore would not question (he hoped), and in the process he would be able to cream off billions.

It was a simple enough plan for a person with a very limited, one-track imagination and a dearth of scruples and morality. But he hasn’t quite been able to keep it all under wraps, and as it has begun to unravel, we have daily become more aware of a huge list of major corruption scandals, fraudulent procurement deals, and institutional scams.

To help achieve his ends, Ruto has introduced a plethora of sources of funds manipulation, including the Sovereign Wealth Fund, the National Infrastructure Fund, the Housing Levy, the Social Health Authority (SHA) and the National Transport and Safety Authority’s automated instant traffic fine system.

All these funds were created by separate Acts of Parliament, rather than by the central exchequer, which is overseen by the controller of budget, Margaret Nyakang'o.

In a shockingly damning statement, Nyakang’o has reported that, as a result, her office cannot see what happens to the billions of shillings of taxpayers’ money collected through these government funds and levies.

“I have no visibility of anything called a fund or a levy,” she said. “They are not visible to me.”

These bodies operate outside the main national bank account, the Consolidated Fund, where all public revenues and tax collections are supposed to be deposited. Nyakang’o cannot track the outward destination of money from these bodies, notably going to high-cost affairs such as road construction and railway development, things Ruto has been particularly fond of.

Remember the underground railway he would like to build? He doesn’t miss a trick. And who hasn’t heard of the Mombasa port road project at Sh5.9

billion per km, the Dongo Kundu bypass at Sh1.8 billion per km, the Nairobi Expressway at Sh2.7 billion per km and, best of all, the Ngong-Naivasha road flyover at Sh3.8 billion for 820 metres?

Tellingly, Nyakang’o, testifying before the Parliamentary Public Petitions Committee in March 2023, spoke of being forced to sign approvals under threat. 

When MPs asked why she didn’t simply say ‘no’, she answered: “It is not a black-and-white, yes-or-no situation. There are very many things that we have to weigh before you arrive at that decision. But what I am saying is that there are loopholes that need to be assessed and my office needs to be protected.” She added, “I am also a woman. When I’m under threat, I have to use discretion.”

The implications are chilling, and the grand heist of Kenya’s wealth continues, rampant and ungoverned, with no oversight and a heinously compromised parliament approving lots of new schemes for wringing Kenyans dry.

And it should be obvious to us. Where do we think all the billions dished out at State House and in personal campaigns are coming from? Where are Ruto and his favoured cohorts getting the money to run around the country with personal helicopters, at the same time as sending motorcades of fantastically expensive vehicles to meet them at their destinations? Where is Ruto getting the wherewithal to fund his billionaire lifestyle?

This is just the petty cash, but the source of this money is not the national budget, so it’s coming from somewhere else.

That ‘somewhere else’ is mainly extortion via the levies and funds Ruto has established, those bogus constructs that have been cunningly and insidiously positioned outside the official economy and marketed as helping Kenyans, while actually draining their lifeblood.

Everything acquired or funded by the government has millions or billions written into the costs, all ready to be siphoned off by Ruto and friends. It is Ruto who is the existential threat to this country.

A damning audit by Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu, for example, revealed that the government spent Sh104.8 billion through unprocured direct sourcing on the SHA’s integrated healthcare information technology system, which the state does not own or even control.

The digital platform is fully owned by a private consortium (Safaricom, Konvergenz, and Apeiro), and you can be sure that this is beholden to Ruto, who has also been linked to Sidian Bank, one of those receiving SHA contributions.

Interestingly, one of his best mates, Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, owns 17 per cent of Sidian Bank’s shares.

The frauds and scams are too numerous to detail here. Randomly, there’s the payroll manipulation of Sh6.2 billion revealed in June in just12 of 53 state departments. So that could be some Sh28 billion overall, achieved through alterations to public payroll records, irregular allowance payments, and nearly 20,000 ghost workers, including in State House.

The fuel situation is mind-boggling. Earlier this year, details emerged of a massive scandal involving the importation and distribution of substandard fuel. High-ranking individuals who were named and resigned included the principal secretary for petroleum, the director-general of the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority and the managing director of Kenya Pipeline.

Then we had Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s recent leak about the scam government-to-government fuel arrangement, whose details he said had been revealed to him by Cyrus Jirongo. That’s a recent death shrouded in some mystery and which should perhaps now be viewed in a different light.

There’s Kenya Power, where Nyoro (him again) in 2022, through insider trading, bought 30 million shares at a depressed price of Sh1.4 per share, after information from his pal Ruto that he was about to pump Sh27 billion into the company in connection with the Last Mile Connectivity programme, and also promising to artificially strengthen the shilling. This all forced the share price up, allowing Nyoro to instantly make a cool Sh500 million in profit, nice pocket money to share with his friends. Nyoro’s ties with Ruto are deep and strong.

There was the fake fertiliser subsidy scam a couple of years back – part of the fraudulent ‘bottom-up’ plan falsely purporting to help struggling small-scale farmers. Millions of bags distributed by the National Cereals & Produce Board contained sand, rocks and animal waste, and crops across thousands of farms were ruined.

Ruto doesn’t give a damn. And speaking of dams – even without going into the old scandal around Arror and Kimwarer –  recurring red flags include ghost advance payments, with billions either sent abroad or paid locally without any technical or financial feasibility studies, bypassing Public-Private Partnership requirements and public oversight, and featuring official figures that are a moveable feast, along with unfulfilled local promises (thanks, Mr Six Months) and consequent legal battles, leaving taxpayers burdened with foreign debt for nothing but arid land.

Meanwhile, the fury of El Nino is coming, and the best that the Met Office and Deputy President Kithuri Kindiki can do is advise people to move from flood-prone areas. To where, pray?

This is ridiculous, callous, ruthless and worthless advice, from a government led by a man who last week was lobbying for climate finance at the UN General Assembly in New York, when at home he slashes down forests while hosting climate change conferences and pretending to care about the environment. Of course, he’s lobbying for climate finance! Any kind of finance will do him, actually. Most welcome.

Elections are another great money-spinner for our national marauders. For comparison, the last UK general election, with at least 10 million more people than in Kenya, cost that government £147.5 million, the equivalent of Sh25 billion. Our own dear IEBC has asked for more than twice that much, a massive Sh61.7 billion, to run our 2027 general election. It’s outrageous. We all know where at least half of that is going. Kenya is being used as a plaything.

And Gachagua told us all about Ruto and IEBC top honchos getting Sh2 billion in kickbacks by manipulating the tender award for an election transmission system, in favour of a South Korean firm already associated with malfeasance elsewhere. Just the kind of people Ruto values and likes.

In fact, any foreign investor who is keen to do business with Ruto and his government should be viewed with profound suspicion.

One could write a book about how Ruto is achieving his ‘agenda’. The excoriated Sifuna, meanwhile, faces, like any other honest opposition candidate, the monumental task of articulating the shape that untangling all this would take.

Anyone can build a stadium, Sifuna has said, but what we are looking for is something higher. And to define the baseline for what people can expect under a proper government, he has emphasised the six essential values named in the introduction to the Kenya Constitution – human rights, democracy, the rule of law, social justice, equity and equality.

Human rights demand that every person’s life is protected and there is no state abuse. No more abductions or shooting, in the leg or elsewhere.

Democracy means power rests with the people, and the leaders are there to serve. But not to serve themselves.

Rule of law means the law applies strictly and to everyone, leaders and the led alike. No one is above the law.

Social justice means everyone is able to access jobs, housing, health and the basic requirements of life.

Equity means giving people support based on their unique needs, so that everyone has an equally fair shot at succeeding.

Equality means equal rights under the law, a fair chance for people to make the most of their lives and talents without discrimination, and fair treatment regardless of their background, gender, age, race, tribe, religion or disability.

What the Constitution guarantees is the life that Sifuna has repeatedly stated he wants us to live. That’s his agenda, while he is doubtless cognisant that disentangling the chaotic, shambolic mess Ruto has landed us in will take tremendous hard work, time and commitment.

Ruto, for his part, recently took a little time out from generally behaving unpresidentially and flinging insults hither and thither, to make what he seemed to think was a ground-breaking announcement.

Breathtakingly devoid of self-awareness, and blithely at ease while delivering a sharp smack in the face to every Kenyan, he said: “If you choose a thief and expect them not to steal from you, you are not being intelligent.”

Actually, Bill, we had just about figured that out for ourselves. We’re learning. But, anyway, thanks for the heads-up. You can sleep peacefully in your bed at night, comfortable in the knowledge that we have made a firm decision to never, ever, be that stupid again. That’s OUR agenda.