Counting from the day of declaration of presidential election results, Tuesday November 15, 2022, marks 100 days since that historic win. That is just enough time for a retrospective look at the build up to that historic event.
Looking back later to tell the evolving story of Kenya, historians will struggle to capture moments and events that they would consider consequential in William Samoei Ruto’s journey to the Presidency. This is because such events and moments, some seemingly innocuous, are many, scattered and randomly distributed over the years.
The footsteps of memory grow soft and recede relentlessly over time. Therefore, before mine fades into the mists of time, here is my angle on some of the events that happened ‘yesterday’ that led to ‘this moment’ that is (still) pregnant with promise.
The Call
It is June 6, 2020, Saturday morning. I was at home, in front of our garage. I had just pulled up the roller shutter. The phone rang. The time was 9.50 am. It lasted less than 3 minutes.
“Kap Kirwok, Chamgei! How are you?”
Although I had been told by a friend (now a key member of the WSR government) to expect a call from ‘ech e’ (that is how he called him, meaning H.E. or His Excellency), it still caught me by surprise. The last time I had talked to H.E. by phone was July 2014! I had initiated the call and had requested him to be the guest of honour at the opening of a secondary school library which I had helped built in my village in Mt. Elgon. At that time, I had been surprised that he had not only answered my call at the first ring, but that the call went through at all!
He continued: “I am putting together a small technical team to help me think about the 2022 presidential campaign. I would like to request you to be part of it. Will you help me?”
The last part of the statement melted away any incipient hesitation on my part. “Will you help me” had not only a ring of embarrassing humility to it, but it also flattered me that he, a talented politician that he is, and a sitting Deputy President of the Republic of Kenya no less is, thought I could help him. Furthermore, I thought he would consider me, as he is wont to do, one of those board-room types with useless kizungu mingi.
The Team
The team, the original nine, was a motley crew with eclectic intellectual and political proclivities and tastes. There was the Chair, a retired professor of chemistry whose memory of the 60s and 70s was enthralling, but whose tolerance could test the patience of a rock! There was a famous, voluble economist who called himself an educated chokora. There was the professor of engineering who employed strategic silence and laughter to deadly effect. There was the clear eyed, omnipresent financial ‘engineer’ who seemed to have clairvoyant powers. There was the dignified lawyer whose measured words conveyed competence and confidence in equal measure. There was the ICT boffin – indefatigable and with a high emotional intelligence quotient. There was the unassuming agri-economist whose mother-tongue influenced diction belied a current of knowledge that ran deep. There was the wordsmith with a talent for pop psychology who could fling a word or phrase towards a target with unerring accuracy. Then there was me, a recovering militant, attempting to melt strategy on the crucible of poetry with a sprinkle of structure, spontaneity, and lots of impatience.
These were the original nine. They styled themselves as the WSR Technical Advisory Committee, or simply TAC. Buttressing this core group was assorted politicos who dropped in and out of our meetings at will, including the man we called the Overall Chair. They represented Nyanza, Coast, Western, Eastern, North-Eastern, Rift Valley, and Central regions.
The Vain Search for the Alpha
At our first meeting, it was clear that we needed to quickly address a key challenge: how to allow the delicate male egos on the table to clash in such a manner that the prevailing environment would be one of creative, productive tension. This task fell on the Chair, a burden he bore with fleeting success. And yes, the TAC was, resistantly and regrettably, an all-male affair. A lady was added a year to the election, but she did not last beyond one meeting, no doubt traumatized by the loud clashing of male egos. Closer to the election, however, battle-hardened ladies joined the now expanded and renamed Presidential Campaign Steering Councill.
The Alpha Male position, on the rare occasions that it showed up, shifted in turns within the group depending on what was being discussed. As you would expect, there were epic clashes – some as close to physical as you can get.
It was therefore no surprise that the first meeting was ‘all over the map’ what you might call a darting-thoughts contest. The debate shifted constantly from lessons of past campaigns (NASA, Jubilee, NARC, etc.) to suitability of the candidate, to who his real opponent was, to how to square the cycle of a sitting Deputy President leading a political insurgency without risking a premature clash with his boss, the President.
I offered to prepare what I called a thought-starter; a 1485-word thought piece that attempted to capture the defining spirit of the time – the zeitgeist; and to populate the mental landscape with appropriate metaphors.
The Moment
In that thought piece, I argued that taken in totality, the 2022 elections presented yet another moment to make a serious attempt at recapturing and realizing the prayers and dreams expressed in our National Anthem. The moment presented itself against a context of converging crises of varied severity: a once-in-a-century pandemic, an accelerating erosion of the rule of law, a looming debt crisis, and a widening gap in wealth and incomes between the few rich and the many poor.
The moment therefore called for a summoning of strength and courage to remake our Nation. The moment called for inspired and insurgent leadership which, if properly guided, would birth a new dawn in Kenya. I pitched the ‘moment’ in the context of an eternal, historical, emotion-stirring struggle; a struggle that must not relent even when “The setbacks we have suffered since independence, be they by mischief or misstep, have reminded us of the pain of deferred dreams. And yet we have remained resilient and hopeful in our struggle against forces that frustrate our efforts, encouraged by the African proverb ‘Out of many still births, a child will survive and thrive.”
In the article I argued that Kenyans know what the new dawn should look like. They know what the struggle is about. This is because they are human. They innately, and with ease, understand the concept of human dignity. In many surveys over the years, the aspirations of Kenyans have a common thread: a political, social, and economic environment that enables the full expression of human potential. In short, Kenyans desire a fulfilling and dignified life.
The Delayed Dawn: What is Holding Kenyans Back?
If Kenyans know what they want, and are blessed in natural resources, human capital, and geographic location, the big question then was, what is holding them back?
Among many factors responsible for holding Kenyans back, the key one, I argued, is colonial legacy and its psychological burdens and traumas. “Kenya as a colonial construct was built on a servant/master foundation in which the country existed as a supply source to the British empire, with the ’natives’ seen not as citizens, but subjects at the beck and call, service, and disposal, of a privileged elite. This state of affairs was maintained and sustained through brute force, subterfuge, and divide and rule tactics. Whilst the government of newly ‘independent’ Kenya attempted a correction of the political economy with its ‘African Socialism and Its application to National Planning’, the foundation of exploitative governance remains to this day. Those that command the center, and the fertile lands still treat those in the margins and the ‘badlands’ as tools with which to amass wealth and power.”
I argued that two critical ingredients are needed to break out of this transgenerational, structural, and psychological stranglehold. First, we need insurgent leadership provided by a brave individual driven by a self-actualization instinct, or, transcendental compassion, or both. Second, the masses, the hoi polloi, need to be reminded – by the insurgent leader – that the ‘powerless’ have power – Mnyonge ana nguvu; that their conditioned powerlessness is just that: apparent not real. Furthermore, they need to be reminded that, whatever trade they are involved in, however humble, has inherent dignity – kazi ni kazi.
The new vision for a Better Kenya, I argued, will rest on three pillars: People and Power; Leadership and Governance; and Policy and Practice.
These were later summarized in a strategic framework for the Campaign.
The Strategic Framework
The Struggle was framed in terms of ultimate and proximate goals made possible by implementing four pillars that rested on a crucial resource foundation as follows:
The ultimate goal was to establish a government that will deliver justice and prosperity to all; one in which the lived reality of all Kenyans reflects the values and aspirations expressed in the National Anthem and codified in the 2010 Constitution. The proximate goal was winning the presidential elections with a governing majority at national and county levels.
The first pillar was the Vision pillar. The task was to articulate a compelling vision for the country – a big idea, an alternative to the status quo that captures the aspirations of the common mwananchi. This pillar eventually evolved into the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) Party Campaign Platform – the bottom-up economic model and the slogan – kazi ni kazi.
The second pillar was building a Coalition. With a compelling alternative vision, we theorized that we could build a coalition that would catalyze an unstoppable movement. Coalition-building, however, proved to be a tough nut to crack – initially. Leaders of new or established political parties stayed away from UDA. So did civil society organisations. Only the Church – important sections of it – showed interest. We decided to focus on an often-neglected coalition partner, the hustler. This was a strategic turning point and had largely been enabled by the candidate’s instinct to “turn to the people at the grassroots” when shunned by his boss.
The third pillar was establishing and building a political organization as the vehicle to canvass electoral support. It was quite clear that using Jubilee Party (JP), the political vehicle that had propelled the incumbent president and his deputy – the UhuRuto ticket – to power in 2017, was no longer an option. The strategy, however, was to give the false impression that the Candidate was determined to contest using JP while surreptitiously preparing alternative political vehicles. Besides rebranding an existing JP coalition partner (the Party of Development and Reforms) into United Democratic Alliance (UDA), at least two other vehicles were available as fall-back.
The fourth and final pillar was positioning the candidate as the right person to drive the vision and lead a winning coalition. This involved amplifying his strengths, downplaying his weaknesses and softening his image.
These four pillars rested on a solid, enabling foundation of analysis and research, and were executed by well-resourced technical, legal, and political teams.
The Stressful Joy of Clearing Hurdles
The journey of H.E. William Samoei Kipchirchir Arap Ruto from being Deputy President to the exalted title of H.E. the President and Commander in Chief of the Republic of Kenya was as improbable as the biblical camel passing through the eye of the needle. As the TAT, we had no illusions about this. We spend many stressful hours, over joyless tea and mandazi, arguing over threat scenarios and constructing anticipate-prempt-explain strategies.
One of many first challenges was how to register a political vehicle or vehicles, surreptitiously, while keeping Jubilee distracted. We borrowed tactics from Sun Tzu (‘The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent’), and Judo’s Professor Jigoro Kano (‘achieve maximum efficiency, with minimum effort’): hence the impression of intense struggle within Jubilee Party between Kieleweke and Tangatanga factions for the soul of the Party. Amidst factional grandstanding and theatrics, the United Democratic Party was quietly registered and gazetted as a rebranded Party of Development and Reforms. Within a year, it was the biggest political party in Kenya.
The second major obstacle was the Building Bridges Initiative, BBI in short. Its success, besides assailing the Constitution, would have put dangerous wind in the sails of its proponents in the run-up to the August 9, 2022, elections. The options were to either oppose vigorously, support wholeheartedly or oppose but appear to support. We opted for the latter. Aware that the BBI proponents had inserted sweeteners in an otherwise poisonous product, we needed to carefully thread the needle in order to stitch together a win-win story with a cautionary flavour. Simultaneously, we were assembling a strong legal team to challenge and stop “Reggae”.
Other hurdles overcome using the same disciplined, analytic approach, were the following: UDA party primary elections amid a fuel crisis; choosing a Running Mate; mobilising the voters and defending their vote across the country; verifying and defending the results at the Bomas of Kenya; and defending the Win at the Supreme Court. Each of these deserves a full-length article.
After victory, will he and the team he has assembled, deliver The Plan? The jury is still out. At the 100-day mark after a historic victory, what is clear is that the country needed the energy, the focus, and the determination we are witnessing.
Personally, I believe he will deliver beyond expectations. Time will tell, though.
