The political education of William Ruto
The Kenyan president is learning that it is difficult to govern a bad economy after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist.
Ken Opalo
President William Ruto has turned out to be a much worse politician than candidate William Ruto. After winning on a populist message, he completely misjudged the months-long simmer of public anger over proposed new taxes.
The cost of living has risen and public services have deteriorated. But corrupt officials on social media are flaunting their opulence in the faces of a pinched populace. Polls, myriad op-eds in the papers, online chatter, and discussions on TV and radio talk-shows, all highlighted public discontent with the 2024 Finance Bill. Yet the events of 25 June 2024 – when countrywide anti-tax protests culminated in the storming of Parliament in Nairobi – seem to have caught him by surprise.
Perhaps he thought that he had sufficiently demobilised all opposition after he cut a “ceasefire” deal with former prime minister Raila Odinga, and nominated him to head the African Union. Or perhaps he made a cynical calculation that his new taxes were most salient among the three million Kenyans in the formal economy, and so wouldn’t come with much political cost as long as he had the countryside onside. That would fit with his administration’s ongoing embrace of class war rhetoric to shut down dissent. He could also have been distracted by the adulation he has been receiving from foreign governments and organisations since entering office. As of the start of last month, he had made 62 visits to 38 countries in just 20 months.
What Ruto failed to notice was the impact of his own presidential campaign, which castigated Uhuru Kenyatta (and Odinga) for excessive borrowing, high taxes, wasteful subsidies, poor services, and a raft of anti-poor policies in an economy that was rigged to favour the establishment. Forget that he was part of the establishment as deputy president.
Invested youth turn on Ruto
His anti-establishment populism (dubbed the “Hustler Movement”) mobilised unemployed or underemployed young voters and made them feel like the government owed them a working economy. These “hustlers” believed that their material fortunes would change under Ruto, and became invested in public policy.
Instead of working with the usual established ethnic kingpins, Ruto’s campaign largely operated through ambitious young political entrepreneurs, religious leaders, and direct populist appeals to voters. That shift in style of political mobilisation increased the salience of economic policy. As a result, Kenyans have shown unprecedented levels of public interest in the minutiae of economic policymaking over the last two years.
Yet, once in power Ruto, quickly moved to demobilise the wave that got him into power and surrounded himself with a larger-than-usual share of individuals seemingly intent on plundering public resources and jettisoning service delivery. Under different circumstances, Ruto might have gotten away with that. Except he inherited a mess.
In 2022, the Kenyan economy was teetering on the edge following the debt binge under Kenyatta. A sovereign default wasn’t entirely off the cards. The ballooning deficits demanded fiscal consolidation: high domestic revenue, less expensive government and tighter control on any new borrowing. The shilling was under pressure and the country was just recovering from a drought that pushed up food prices. Jobs were increasingly scarce. Real incomes had stagnated for the better part of a decade.
Vindictive but lightweight
The manner of Ruto’s victory and personnel choices limited his ability to adequately address these challenges. In Parliament, his populist wave yielded a majority of political lightweights who, despite occupying important leadership positions, are more interested in singing his praises than voicing their constituents’ grievances. Within the executive, individuals with neither experience nor expertise in public administration landed critical jobs.
Furthermore, an air of vindictiveness towards the establishment that had rejected him in 2022 foreclosed on the possibility of seeking constructive feedback or support on important policy questions. The administration more or less declared war on institutions and firms that opposed his candidacy, including the media. All this meant that the administration was primed to dismiss initial murmurs against the 2024 Finance Bill as middle-class re-litigation of the 2022 presidential election.
But public interest in the Bill made it impossible for the administration to spin the tax measures as principally targeted at the “spoiled” middle class (everyone eats bread, it turns out).
Astonishingly, the administration invested very little in selling the 2024 Finance Bill to the public. It didn’t show credible evidence of improvements in public services to justify further increases in taxes. The Treasury’s principal secretary and the National Assembly’s finance committee chair showed up for the media unprepared and without any coherent rationale for the proposed tax increases.
All this fuelled public perception that the Finance Bill was written in Washington by the International Monetary Fund as part of Kenya’s fiscal consolidation programme – further eroding already threadbare government legitimacy Ruto should have known better. Most reasonable commentators would agree that in 2022 his campaign elevated public discourse over policy in Kenya to a higher plane. He diminished the role of ethnicity in elections and spoke to millions of Kenyans who had been disenfranchised by Kenyatta’s cronyism, when he promised to equalise the economic playing field.
Unfortunately for Kenyans, it appears that all he sought to do was destroy the old system but lacked any plans to build something new. And now he is reaping the rewards of that oversight.
Plummeting buy-in for taxes will frustrate his plans to increase government revenue without digging further into debt, and make it virtually impossible to implement much-needed development plans.
Ken Opalo is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. A long version of this analysis was published in his Substack: The Africanist Perspective
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