UhuRuto spat: Case of the pot calling the kettle black

When he broke his political hiatus slightly over a week ago, former President Uhuru Kenyatta acknowledged that his administration had not been perfect.

But he seemed preoccupied with painting his tenure as rosier than President William Ruto’s, which only recently turned three. To Uhuru, his successor was experimenting with government policies and undoing the gains of the former regime, much to the detriment of Kenyans.

He had something to say about how Dr Ruto was handling healthcare, security, education and human rights. None of it was flattering.

“Some of the truths we spoke of yesterday have become the realities of today,” Uhuru gloated about having warned Kenyans about Ruto ahead of the 2022 elections. “As we continue to dwell in rhetoric rather than progress, we repeat the mistakes of the past. Some of the truths we spoke about have become the nightmares that many are living with.”

On Tuesday, Ruto would counter his former boss’s assertions, saying he was doing the best with the cards handed to him. Education under Uhuru’s presidency was in shambles, Ruto and his allies said, pointing out that most universities had sunk into technical insolvency.

“We had a system, which I had to take the decision to stop, of sending students to private universities when we didn’t have the money to pay for them,” Ruto said of a system that he claimed had seen the government owe the institutions Sh120 billion, hailing his radical reforms in education as revamping the sector.

The most memorable bits of Ruto’s speech at the Umma University in Kajiado were his thoughts that the Linda Jamii programme, on which the president’s universal healthcare is based, was more comprehensive than the defunct Linda Mama, which primarily focused on providing free maternal healthcare.

At the event, Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale said the Linda Mama initiative, which guaranteed free clinics for expectant mothers, free delivery and free treatment for infants until they turned one in public hospitals, had left a debt worth more than Sh5 billion.

Ruto’s allies would go on about other sectors that they claimed the former Jubilee administration had left run down, a message that punctuated the speeches of Ruto’s allies in the early days of the Kenya Kwanza administration.

Back then, Ruto insisted on upending the system he inherited from Uhuru, which he had faulted in the campaigns as having entrenched corruption and the marginalisation of communities, and disenfranchised Kenya’s “hustlers (young strivers).”

Benson Mukunji, 31, bought the ‘hustler’ narrative and voted for Ruto in the 2022 polls. A previous supporter of Uhuru’s, he was endeared to Ruto’s message of including the downtrodden in governance and the disruption of the status quo.

“I was hopeful that he would change things,” said Mukunji, who works in the construction industry. “Kiliniramba (I regret it).”

Over the last three years, as Mukunji pointed out, Ruto has largely done the opposite of what he promised. His presidency increasingly seems like an extension of Uhuru’s, as he pursues similar policies, repeats his predecessor’s mistakes, and seeks unquestionable powers, mostly by muzzling Parliament.

Brian Oyimba, a 32-year-old teacher, said that there is not much of a difference between the pair to warrant claims such as Uhuru’s that Ruto was undoing the previous administration’s gains.

“Their policies in sectors such as education, health and housing are just the same, although Ruto introduced some tweaks,” said Oyimba, who described himself as a Raila Odinga sympathiser.

But he noted that the tax burden has grown heavier under Ruto’s presidency, reducing his disposable income.

“I don’t support Ruto, but I hope that his policies succeed because the country will succeed, too,” said Oyimba.

Mukunji concurred, saying that he had witnessed many of his friends undergo significant financial strain in recent years as the prices of many commodities, besides unga, “become unaffordable.”

Kenya Kwanza’s prequel was not as rosy as Uhuru would want to paint it. While it witnessed leaps in some sectors, such as infrastructure, where more roads were constructed and more Kenyans connected to electricity, Uhuru’s tenure involved as much experimentation as the former president accused his successor of performing. And confusion galore.

The first experiment was how much debt the country could handle. By the time Uhuru was done with his term in 2022, he had saddled the country with more debt than the three other presidents before him. He inherited from the late former President Mwai Kibaki a public debt worth Sh1.8 trillion, handing over to Ruto a debt burden of Sh8.7 trillion.

Most of it was “odious,” argued Bernard Muchere, a fraud examiner who worked as an internal auditor at the National Treasury for four decades, uncovering corruption scandals.

“Uhuru is the one who amended the Public Finance Management Act to allow for the depositing of loans outside the consolidated fund, starting these fraud schemes,” said Muchere. “Ruto is following his script. None of them is better than the other.”

Current and former National Treasury officials, including Principal Secretary Chris Kiptoo and former minister Henry Rotich, have previously dismissed the claims about Kenya’s debt being odious, saying they were procured lawfully and prudently spent.

By the time Uhuru was retiring, Kenya’s appetite for loans had invited the Bretton Woods institutions to the country’s decision-making table. Even worse, it ensnared Kenya in a debt trap that saw it borrow to pay loans. When Uhuru left, Sh6 of every Sh10 collected serviced debt.

Signs that Uhuru had an appetite for huge loans emerged in 2014, when Kenya acquired a contentious $2 billion Eurobond, whose utilisation remains questionable to date. The headache of settling this debt, which matured last year, was handed down to Kenya Kwanza.

“This short-term, expensive borrowing significantly strained the country’s fiscal position, bringing Kenya dangerously close to defaulting on its sovereign debt obligations, Leonard Khafafa, a public policy analyst, wrote in a commentary on The Standard this week. “By the end of his tenure, the debt-to-GDP ratio had ballooned to nearly 70 per cent, a level widely regarded as unsustainable.”

Jubilee incurred these loans mainly to fund mega infrastructure projects, such as the 11,000 kilometres of tarmac Uhuru constructed. But there were always allegations that the projects had their costs inflated to the alleged benefit of government officials. The Standard, in 2020, reported that the standard gauge railway project, Uhuru’s flagship programme that cost the taxpayer Sh372 could have been inflated by Sh29 billion.

The 27-kilometre Nairobi Expressway similarly saw its cost shoot from an initial Sh65 billion to Sh88 billion, attracting much scrutiny.

“If you look at how much was borrowed against how much was constructed, it doesn’t add up,” said Muchere. “Uhuru started well by going for public-private partnerships, but converted them into commercial contracts, meaning the government would be the borrower. This SGR and even the medical equipment leasing programme, which later became a scandal.”

While Uhuru defended the immense borrowing as necessary to set up a solid foundation for progress, his decisions, which also included subsidies on fuel and unga, faulted by experts as unsustainable, meant that his successor faced an unfavourable situation from the get-go.

Indeed, Ruto’s administration  lamented from day one, with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua saying they had inherited “empty coffers.”

The Head of State has done little to dig himself out of Uhuru’s hole. He, too, is big on borrowing, pushing Kenya’s public debt ever closer to Sh12 trillion, a worrying statistic just three years down the line.

Like Ruto, Uhuru experimented with the respect for human rights. By its actions, it was clear that the Jubilee administration preferred to disregard them. Uhuru’s security machine, the one he said was “not meant to face the citizens,” did exactly that.

It was very much a “source of fear and conflict,” as he asserted the security apparatus had become under Ruto’s presidency, evidenced by the extra-judicial killings conducted on Uhuru’s watch, as well as enforced disappearances.

A police crack unit carried out macabre operations with the likely endorsement of the state. Police officers brazenly shot at unarmed Kenyans. In broad daylight. Demonstrators were met with as much force as that meted out on youthful protesters in demos staged since last year.

Children, like the late Baby Pendo, bore the brunt of this brutality, which the former ruling administration played blind and deaf to.

Kenya Kwanza has emulated this disregard for rights and is possibly more extreme. Abductions of government critics have become commonplace. The police have equally cracked down hard on demonstrators, killing tens and injuring many since last year. In a departure, Ruto recently set up a team to compensate victims of police brutality, whose operations the courts halted.

“They are birds of the same feather, and, as much as I don’t agree with Ruto, the pot should not call the kettle black,” said George Musamali, a security analyst. “The Constitution had very good provisions that would ensure the independence of the police, delinking them from the Executive, but Uhuru and Ruto eroded this with amendments to the security laws as soon as they were elected in 2013.”

Musamali highlighted amendments that stripped the National Police Service Commission of powers to hire the Inspector General of Police, as aimed at ensuring the government maintained control.

“Once they controlled the police, the excesses started,” he said.

Mukunji, who said he supported last year’s protests, stated that “everything Uhuru warned us about Ruto was true.”

Dissent among the political class has also been handled in the same manner. Like Uhuru, Ruto has faced accusations of targeting critics with arrests and trumped-up charges, which are often dropped when a truce is struck.

Corruption reigned supreme during Uhuru’s presidency, and he admitted as much, claiming once that as much as Sh2 billion was lost to graft daily. All this as his allies grew wealthier, some of whom would later face corruption charges.

Uhuru often talked tough against corruption, but the eruption of scandals poured cold water on his commitment to taming the vice. Corruption was virtually in every sector, including health, as Khafafa pointed out.

“As Uhuru extolled his administration’s healthcare initiatives for expectant mothers, he omitted the scandals that imperilled the lives of Kenya’s most vulnerable citizens,” he said. “Among these was the 2016 Afya House scandal, involving the misappropriation of Sh5 billion earmarked for free maternity care and HIV programmes. Equally egregious was the 2020 Covid-19 funds scandal, in which Sh7.8 billion allocated for personal protective equipment and essential medical supplies was misused.” 

There was some semblance of action when he sacked five cabinet secretaries he had suspended over corruption claims. The onboarding of the Kenya Defence Forces into the Executive was also meant to prevent corruption.

Corruption is equally rife within the current administration, with the collapse of cases involving Ruto’s allies pouring cold water on his commitment to fighting graft.

Another experiment was the implementation of the competency-based curriculum, whose controversies persisted into Ruto’s presidency. Many experts had faulted the programme as rushed.