Kenya is a prolific breeding ground for world-class talent. On the athletic front, the country’s reputation as a veritable geyser of track talent will soon be on full display on the world stage at the ongoing Summer Olympics in Paris.
Our athletes, for a few weeks at least, will be the toast of the town. However, if history is any guide, the Kenyan sports stars who triumph in Paris will likely end up receiving more recognition abroad than at home.
Consider, for instance, Humphrey Kayange, the retired rugby player, biochemist and member of the International Olympic Committee Athletes' Commission. Despite his global acclaim, Kayange's name was scarcely mentioned when President William Ruto was casting about and “reflecting” on the best candidate to take on the role of Cabinet Secretary in the Ministry of Youth Affairs, Creative Economy and Sports.
Instead, Ruto, exercising all the wisdom he could muster, nominated Kipchumba Murkomen, the former CS for the Ministry of Roads and Transport, to take over the sports docket. I will leave it to you dear reader to puzzle over what qualifications Murkomen, a lawyer, possesses that make him an ideal candidate to head two vastly different ministries, both outside his professional expertise, in such quick succession.
What should be clear to all of us is that Murkomen cannot hold a candle to Kayange or to the many accomplished sportsmen and women in Kenya with an international sporting pedigree. Such individuals have the expertise and background to not only manage our sporting affairs competently but also serve as a draw to investors who want a slice of Kenya’s underdeveloped but clearly rich talent pool.
Many of Ruto’s other Cabinet picks, made with the tacit if guarded complicity of ODM leader Raila Odinga, also fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Kenya’s young people took to the streets, braved the brutality of a thuggish police force and lost their lives demanding accountability and competence in governance.
Ruto and Raila paid lip service to these demands while collaborating to assemble one of the most underwhelming, professionally third-rate and ethically dubious Cabinets in recent memory. If they were physicians and Kenya their patient, they would be recommending a balanced diet and exercise to someone in the midst of a coronary event.
Yet, styling themselves as benevolent statesmen, Ruto and Raila would like us to thank them for an outcome that nobody asked for. Ruto wants us to forget the blame he heaped on President Uhuru Kenyatta for working with Raila under the rubric of the now infamous “handshake”. Raila, meanwhile, wants us to believe that his closest allies marched into the heart of government without his blessing.
These are fanciful notions but reveal why Kenya’s political scene is such a caricaturist’s dream. Anyone with even a basic understanding of Kenya’s history knows that Ruto and Raila are falling back on an old playbook.
We are firmly in “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” territory. But the joke is on the politicians. Both shall find their new robes ill-fitting. Ruto, who once tried to define himself by a non-tribal, non-elite, issue-based politics, has not publicly retreated into the country’s worst impulses.
And by getting into bed with the government of the day, albeit gingerly this time around, Raila has repeated the same misstep that arguably cost him the 2022 presidential election and could now jeopardise his bid for chairperson of the African Union Commission.
So why do it? A charitable view of the current situation is that Ruto and Raila genuinely want to save Kenya—but only if they are the ones in charge of the rescue. So minded, they are scraping the bottom of the talent barrel, even as the country is brimming with untapped, world-class talent.
A more critical assessment reveals an elite ensnared by a self-soothing, Moi-era illusion of statecraft. In this way, at a time when the country is pregnant with change, they are not merely deceiving Kenyans but are also deceiving themselves.