Dr Ruto should learn from history: Rule by fear always fails

President William Ruto’s government is sitting delicately on the weighing scales of popular rule and, in converse, reign of terror and fear. And it seems that the State House is consciously tilting towards terror, shock and awe. The State might do well to pause, to reflect on the wisdom behind this choice and its improbable sustainability. 

 A year-long period of firm dissent and street protests by Gen-Z youth has steadily pushed Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza government towards paroxysms of anger and coercion. Fear is steadily becoming the default tool of engagement with the public. The President’s recent “shoot to maim” order speaks to a government that is itself in the knots of frustration and fear. Earlier, Ruto’s Interior CS, Kipchumba Murkomen, issued the “shoot to kill” edict, a command that was echoed by Belgut MP Nelson Koech. 

While Murkomen has since gone soft on the draconian order and issued more humane guidelines to the police on acceptable use of firearms in managing public unrest, panic on the part of the government is unmistakable. The President has himself publicly expressed anxiety over what he described as a conspiracy to topple him through the Gen-Z uprisings. But while the government is nervous, it has also chosen to immerse the public in the well of fear. 

The Kenya National Human Rights Commission has reported more than one hundred extra-judicial killings by the Kenya Police over the first half of the year. The Kenyan nation is in a slippery space, as it approaches the definition of a tyrannical police state. Arbitrary arrests, torture, and malevolent spread of fear are becoming daily official servings to the public. It is Nicolo Machiavelli’s old alphabet of maintaining a firm hold on power, no matter what it takes. How far could President Ruto possibly go in that direction? Are there limits beyond which the Kenyan government could consider it outrageous to go? 

Machiavelli, a 16th-century political thinker and diplomat, infamously advised people in power that it was desirable for a leader to be both loved and feared. Yet, if he must choose between being loved and being feared, he should settle for fear. In his stark book titled The Prince, Machiavelli described fear as the most reliable tool for securing obedience from the ruled. This Italian philosopher stated that leaders were more likely to be disobeyed by those who loved them than they were by those who feared them. Hence, a stable leader was the one who filled up the citizens with volumes of fear of him. He discouraged leaders from seeking public validation and popularity.

Has President Ruto now decided that this is the way to go? A regime that romped home on exuberant triumphalism and wild cheers in August 2022 increasingly gravitates away from the popular path to brutal power. Allied legislators proclaim gleefully at public rallies that “We will steal votes for Ruto and stuff the boxes with stolen ballot papers”  as others brashly call on the police to “shoot and kill.” 

The ”stuff the boxes” call by the Ruto-leaning Wajir County Woman MP Fatuma Abdi Jehow is so far the most brazen show of the State’s disdain for democratic popularity, in preference for fear-inducing alternatives. Put together with the show of military might in the streets of Nairobi in the wake of Gen-Z protests in June last year; and the wanton shooting and killing in cold blood by masked men in unmarked cars during Sabasaba demos, the chilling message from the State would appear to be that nothing will stand in the way of a second term for President Ruto. And fear is the chosen tool that will deliver the much desired ten years without a break. 

Other forms of selling fear to the Kenyan public include harassment by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, false imprisonment, persecution by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, and, of course, abductions, disappearances and cold-blooded deaths of abductees. 

Great minds like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), George Santayana (1863-1952), and Winston Churchill (1874-1965) all remind us that those who do not know history will repeat some of its most atrocious mistakes. For we would know that rule by fear has failed the test of history over millennia. While the world has had many tyrants, the notion of tyranny is famously associated with Julius Caesar, who reigned over the Roman Empire for just under four years. Few have understood this man’s tragic story. He is often lionised as a great emperor. His name easily comes to mind, even for anyone with the most basic knowledge of history. Yet, Caesar’s greatest contribution to the story of humankind is the lesson on the futility of leadership that thrives on fear. 

The tragic story of Julius Caesar reminds us of the short nature of regimes founded on tyranny. They must eventually fall, and often disastrously too. Otherwise also known as Caligula, Caesar reigned from 49BC to 44 BC. Despite the fact that other dictators had ruled before him, he became the first person to be officially known as “the tyrant.” 

Caesar is remembered for the heavy taxes that he imposed on the people and the cruelty that bordered on madness. He killed leaders he considered traitors and made himself the ultimate absolute monarch. Yet history records that Caesar lived in fear. He was afraid of being toppled by his enemies. He would, however, put on shows of bravado, declaring that he feared nothing. In the following millennium, William Shakespeare dramatised Caesar’s tragic story in a play named after the emperor. We read of Caesar declaring his masked fear to his close courtiers, “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep at night. Yonder Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”  

Even great men who call from podiums with declarations of “Enough is enough!” often do so out of fright. Doubts about their invincibility overwhelm them when, outwardly, they are most confident. Hence, the great Caesar is afraid of Cassius, whose intellectual abilities worry him. When a friend tells Caesar not to fear Cassius, the emperor states, “I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid so soon as that … Cassius. He reads too much. He is a great observer and he looks quite through the deeds of men … ”

Caesar’s fears were factors in his style of rule. Like Kenya’s Ruto, he took away the powers of the Roman Senate. He eroded all the powers of institutions of government, again Kenyan style, in the name of “changing Rome.” But Caligula did worse things, even within the family. Descent pens find it difficult to write what he did, even to his own relatives. Besides, he not only became the highest bishop (Pontifex Maximus), but he also declared himself a god to be worshipped by ordinary folk. 

Critically, in all this, Caesar lived in fear, and he was equally feared. Regrettably, Caesar was taken out in under four years of rule, not by riotous crowds, but by the people who hung around him. Brutus, the one man he thought was his greatest friend, struck the final knife blow, leading the wounded emperor to wonder aloud, “Even you, Brutus?” 

Such is the tragedy of fear as a weapon of exercising power. Such environments generate anxiety for everyone. Citizens are afraid. They are not allowed to express. Rulers are afraid. They pretend to know everything, but fear the unknown. The people around them are afraid. They fear being dismissed or killed. Or otherwise ruined. And the biggest conspirators are the people right next to the big man. 

Kenya’s emerging fearful government may want to reflect deeply on the slippery path it’s placing itself on. When the time came for strongman Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania to fall in December 1989, the police refused to shoot at the crowds in Bucharest and elsewhere in the country. The fear was gone. The military refused to fly the Ceausescu couple to safety. Twenty-four years of oppression, fear and silence evaporated into thin air within just about one hour. And in Manila, in the Philippines, the despotic Ferdinand Marcos succumbed to popular unrest in 1986. 

In the killing fields of Cambodia, in the 1970s and the ‘80s, the dreaded Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge killed 2.5 million citizens. He was a brutal individual. Fear, torture, diseases, starvation and other crude methods failed to secure him. Here was a man who closed schools, forced people to migrate, and even abolished religion. Pol Pot’s darkest hour came when his former close friends conspired against him. While his oppressive regime fell to an invading Vietnamese foreign army, it was his close allies who arrested him years later and took him through a sham trial. They placed him under life imprisonment. 

Pol Pot had himself ordered the deaths of hundreds of his friends, out of suspicion and fear. That is how the wheels of fear and suspicion grind. When regimes such as Kenya Kwanza begin toying with the weapon of fear, they do well to begin by appreciating from history the implications for everyone in the drama. The rule of fear spares nobody, not even the big man himself. 

Elsewhere, Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea’s eleven years of dictatorial rule came to an abrupt end in 1979. Once again, it was those closest to him who ended his brutal reign. Macias is remembered as one of the most brutal and feared leaders Africa has ever produced. He established a personality cult in the country’s one-party state. The entire Equatorial Guinea was like one huge Nazi concentration camp. He killed anywhere up to 300,000 people, by most estimates. 

Nothing new happens in Africa. Macias was best at home in the company of quasi-literate characters, who flattered him much of the time. They would tell him how he was God’s own special work. They conspired against other people and determined who should be hit next. The Equatorial Guinean president himself often talked of people who were out to overthrow his government. And, often, he struck at them. He arrested and jailed his own ministers and members of their families. 

History recalls how in 1969 Macias killed 186 dissidents in the stadium in the capital town, Malabo. Some were hanged to death. Others were shot dead. Still, others literally dug their own graves in which they were buried alive, up to the neck. They were then left to be eaten by red ants, until they died after a few days each. Yet, in the end, Macias also went. Over the years, he had ordered the mass murder of ministers and MPs, declared himself life president, placed his portraits in every church sanctuary, and declared himself to be officially referred to as “the Unique Miracle”. He outlawed Christianity. His nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the present president, was the person who overthrew Macias. Macias was tried and sentenced “to die 101 times.”

Once again, the lesson is clear. It is not the citizens out there who are a danger to the strongman who spreads fear through the nation. The enemies are, in fact, right there next to him. They overwhelm him with praise and worship songs, and sundry flowery panegyrics. In more recent times, Africa has witnessed the removal of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, when the soldiers refused to shoot at protesting civilians. In Sudan, the dreaded Omar El Bashir went down following military intervention by his own appointed commanders, who intervened in a shutdown of the country by angry civilians. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe was removed by his colleagues, led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is in office today. 

The lowest common factor among all these men and their regimes was the use of fear as a tool of control. It failed in the long run. Even as Murkomen beats a hasty formal retreat, the wisdom of the quality of advice President Ruto receives remains under the spotlight.

History has proved Jesus Christ right, that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. Kenya Kwanza may wish to revisit its choice of violence and fear. It is unlikely that President Ruto will succeed with this style. From Caesar to Hitler, and from Benito Mussolini to  Augusto Pinochet, and scores of others, it failed. It will fail again. Kenya Kwanza should rethink its choice of the weapon of fear.