Fairly soon after Dr William Ruto was sworn in as Kenya’s fifth president, I wrote a column in which I argued that the one thing he did not have to worry about was keeping the many promises that he had made during the campaign period.
I had some fairly solid grounds for this assumption. Locally, I could point out that none of the previous four presidents had ever managed to keep even a fraction of the promises they made during their struggle for power.
Kenya’s second (and longest-serving) president, Daniel Moi, was famously contemptuous of those foolish enough to believe the promises he made when wooing opposition leaders to join him in government. And when our third president, Mwai Kibaki, actually kept his pledge to provide free primary education, this actually came as a pleasant surprise as hardly anyone had expected that he would indeed keep that promise.
And maybe we should ask: What happened to all those free personal laptops that President Uhuru Kenyatta promised to place in the hands of every Kenyan child?
My point is, that once you accept that what Kenyans practice is a rather pure form of identity politics (locally referred to as “tribal kingpin politics”) then you will have no illusions about any Kenyan president being placed under serious pressure to deliver on his promises.
And it is not just in Kenya where we see this. British politics, for example, may not be dominated by regional kingpins, but the overall trends as concerns political promises, are no different.
Consider how former Prime Minister Boris Johnson made all kinds of extravagant promises when campaigning for his country to leave the European Union. He painted the EU as a giant drain on British taxpayers’ money and promised that once Britain was rid of the bureaucrats in Brussels, there would be plenty of funds available for British priorities like the National Health Service.
There was of course no such windfall for the British taxpayer. And yet if Boris Johnson is no longer PM (indeed no longer even an MP) it is due to the shenanigans he engaged in during the Covid-19 lockdowns, not because his lies over the Brexit vote were exposed.
And as for the promises made by Donald Trump, first as a presidential candidate in 2016 who went on to win; then as a candidate again in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden; and now again as he prepares for yet another presidential race: can anyone even count those promises?
And yet Trump remains immensely popular within the Republican party, and – unlike the first time he ran for president – nobody seems willing to rule out a return to the Trump presidency after the 2024 election.
So, evidence abounds of prominent politicians paying no price at all when they fail to keep their promises.
But as it turns out, I was wrong about the situation in Kenya.
Barely a day passes but there is some fresh criticism of the president and his team, with the essential accusation being that the promises which were made during the campaigns have not been kept.
Whether it is the promise to hold down the cost of fuel; or the promise of reduced cost of living; or of jobs and other economic opportunities. There seems to be no end to such criticism, as much on social media as in the mainstream press.
So, what has changed? Why is President Ruto being held to account in a manner which is really quite unusual both globally and locally?
My speculation on the reason for this largely rests on the proliferation of inexpensive smartphones, which has put the power of the internet into just about every hand in the country: and with it, access to social media.
People do not in general go to social media in a spirit of educational inquiry: they log on in search of amusement and entertainment. And perhaps nothing is so entertaining to the average man or woman than to see the high and mighty of this world mocked and contemptuously dismissed by a perfectly ordinary Kenyan featured on some amateur video, who is demanding accountability and insisting that the President keep his promises.