Out in the streets, they refer to President William Ruto as “Zakayo”, after the biblical tax collector, Zacchaeus, whose story is narrated in Luke 9:1-10. This refers to his ‘capture all’ taxation policies, meaning, “If it moves [or doesn’t], Ruto will tax it.” Over the past year and a half, the President has shown an obscene appetite for new taxes, and citizens actually joke and create daily online memes about the perceived next targets of Ruto’s tax monster.
It is the kind of profile you would ordinarily expect the head of state to match with policies and actions that promote local production, local jobs. You would expect him to frown on profit and capital repatriation from the country.
In every sense, after all, he is employee Number One of this great republic. One cannot just be seen as a modern-day Zacchaeus, the legendary tax collector, without helping create the jobs and the business environment that will enhance the ability of the population to meet his tax demands.
However, as we say in these shores, “Things are different on the ground.” The President made a widely publicised four-day state visit to the US from May 19. The first thing Kenyans noticed from pictures of his JKIA departure was that he was being flown, neither in the presidential jet nor a Kenya Airways aircraft.
It turned out to be a VIP luxury hire from an Emirati dealership. Initial assessments indicated the cost of flying Ruto to and from the visit would overshoot Sh200 million.
The outrage was almost universal. Perhaps, given the generally short outrage span of the Kenyan population, the matter would probably have ended there. But on returning, Ruto decided to address the matter. On his verified X page, he explained, to much disdain of Kenyans who asked why his delegation shunned the national carrier, that the cost of the luxury Emirati jet had been cheaper than flying KQ. The collective national jaw fell to the floor!
Even assuming the President was right, one thing has to worry you about his response. The government is the majority shareholder in Kenya Airways. In the unlikely event that it actually turns out to be true that a luxury jet costs less to fly a delegation to the US than a KQ commercial flight, Ruto should lead from the front on this issue. He should call for examination of the pricing structure of the national carrier, the government’s own taxation policies and their impact on the competitiveness of KQ, and the sustainability of any product pricing that drives business away. Remember those taxpayers that “Zakayo” needs?
Well, they work for KQ, not the Emirati dealers, so it is in his interest that KQ not only performs but becomes the airline of choice for government travel.
President Ruto’s X message also sustains a concern I have consistently expressed here. Both he and Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua seem to prefer micromanaging everything, which means they speak up on every issue, rather than letting technocrats and hired staff deal with certain aspects of communication. I think the relevant CS or state agency would have issued the statement, instead of the President’s official page. This way, it would have allowed Ruto to walk back his comments and even issue a ‘clarification’, following the public outrage. The President speaking on every policy matter actually blunts the creativity and intuition of his surrogates.
Apart from the cost of the trip itself, the default setting for the success or otherwise of such excursions, at least in the eye of the public, lies in the aesthetics and optics. First, I noticed the larger number of travellers actually tweeting and sharing pictures from the trip were lower-end comedians, actresses and bloggers; obviously too mesmerised, merely by being there, to channel any meaningful message around the tour. I am not sure Ruto, or indeed, his retinue, has any value for pictures of excited members of the delegation outside the White House, with the repeated caption “This/Thus far it’s Ebenezer.”
But beyond the concern about a presidential delegation buried in personal glory at the expense of the actual tour theme, I wondered if the size of a delegation of this magnitude made sense. You see, Ruto is the chief bearer of the ‘Taptengelei Principle’, the gospel of the digital renaissance, in which he says Kenyan youth can “tap their computers” and make money online in the new economic world order. This Eureka moment was declared during a public rally at Taptengelei, Nandi county, not long ago.
In view of this, my belief is that a lot of the people who actually were physically with Ruto in the US didn’t really need to be there. From a moral perspective, a hungry population may accept that their leader will once in a while engage in diplomacy and bilateral travel with leaders of other nations, but carrying along a huge delegation (and nearly the entire family) whose return on the travel investment isn’t immediately apparent, flies in the face of austerity measures forced on the population.
I’m sure the Ministry of ICT would have set up mechanisms for enabling many in the delegation to follow and act on most deliberations in the US, from right here at home. For context, around the same time that the Ruto delegation was holding meetings in the US, ODM boss Raila Odinga and secretary general Edwin Sifuna, were keynote speaker and panellist, respectively, at the Oxford Africa Conference 2024, in Oxford, England.
The conference was incidentally themed ‘Charting Africa’s Path Forward’. More importantly, folks around the world were able to join the session online and even participate in interactive sessions. You can be sure that staff of the ODM leaders in this case are able to generate reports and follow-up action without having been there. The UDA regime needs to learn a thing or two from this. And while they are still in learning mode, it will help them to know that the Raila delegation to England flew Kenya Airways!
Back to the US trip, I happened onto a cartoon in one of the dailies, depicting former US President and the Republican Party’s presumed flagbearer, Donald Trump. In it, the former President warns that he would be taking over as US President, and whatever deals struck with President Joe Biden would not stick. I have never seen a worse person in high office than Donald Trump.
But I think the foreign affairs gurus at the Ministry already know the Trump right-wing agenda, if he indeed triumphs in the upcoming US election, will negate many bilateral steps undertaken by the Ruto-Biden governments, under the stewardship of Ambassador Megan Whitman. The “America First” Trump mantra, in its raw form, will roll back gains made in sectors such as non-governmental support, security and health support, which, incidentally, might include Kenya’s mission to Haiti. It is therefore imperative that we are not just calculating the cost of the hired ‘Hustler Jet’ vis a vis gains made from the tour, but whether these gains can outlast a US President whose term may actually end in less than seven months.
Political commentator