William Ruto did something remarkable back in June 2022 when he went before electoral authorities to present his presidential bid. The citizens who officially proposed and seconded his presidential candidature were a vegetable vendor from Kiambu, in rural central Kenya, and a boda-boda man from Nairobi, the capital. This was according to the deputy president’s plan, a symbolic gesture to reaffirm his claim to be the anti-establishment candidate whose presidency would uplift the downtrodden in society. The would-be “hustler-in-chief ” had picked two of his fellow hustlers, a man and a woman of simple means, to back him up when he went to the Boms of Kenya to be nominated as a presidential candidate. For Ruto, this was a race to economic freedom, a fight to break the dominance of the “privileged” political families that he said had dominated Kenyan politics since independence from British colonial rule in 1963. Those families included the Kenyatta dynasty, which produced the first and fourth presidents, and the Odinga family, from which a vice president and a prime minister emerged. Despite his immense wealth and years in government, Ruto said he could still identify with ordinary people as the son of “a noboy” who knew what it was like to sleep hungry.
It is hard to overstate the challenge Ruto faced in trying to become Kenya’s fifth president. There were corruption allegations that sparked rumors he would be indicted and, therefore, legally blocked from standing for president. His personal relationship with his boss, Uhuru Kenyatta, was so lousy that in public they sometimes seemed to be on the verge of a verbal if not physical confrontation, and once, according to a leaked audio, the deputy president contemplated slapping the president. In his second term Kenyatta squeezed Ruto out of government business and urged him to resign, even suggesting that his deputy was a coward for criticizing an administration in which he continued to serve as Kenya’s No. 2.
The cause of their animosity wa a so-called “handshake” between Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga to end political tensions in March 2018 after Kenyatta secured his second term. Ruto felt betrayed by this truce, according to which Odinga ended public activism against Kenyatta’s government in return for the president’s support in the 2022 election. Yet this truce was not in fact the beginning of estrangement between Ruto and Kenyatta, political enemies who joined hands to stage a successful presidential campaign in 2013 partly to defeat serious criminal charges at The Hague. In their first term they served almost as equals in what was sometimes described as a 50-50 arrangement, and it appears Ruto did just enough to entrench his loyalists across the public service. Ruto effectively controlled the government by 2017, and by the time Kenyatta felt threatened by his aggressive deputy it was too late to take corrective action in a decisive way. He lost that fight. Ruto himself has asserted, perhaps reasonably, that it was he, the running mate, who made Kenyatta president.
Ruto has been Kenya’s president since September 2022. He also may be the most interesting Kenyan since Daniel arap Moi, the president under whose long rule Ruto came of age. Like Moi, he was born poor. Like Moi, he was greatly underestimated in his rise to power. And like Moi, he rules not as a primitive dictator but with such authority that any opposition to his wishes is simply intolerable. But the Kenyan state in 2024 is much stronger than it was in the 1990s, with a more independent judiciary and a legislature now more likely to resist a strong presidency when it really matters.
What will Kenya look like when Ruto’s presidency is over? His muscular style of leadership has raised concern about a return to the Moi years, during which the Nyayo spirit of “peace, love and unity” back-ended one-party rule that was in turn underpinned by a strong security apparatus.
Beyond the obvious comparisons with Moi, Ruto is a man of his own who has shown an uncanny capacity to evolve in the new Kenya. He may repeat some of what Moi did to keep power, but he also looks like one likely to try other maneuvers in order to consolidate it. Now, firmly in power, it is no longer possible to underestimate Ruto. He wants to build an economic legacy more robust than any of his predecessors left behind, even if achieving that means alienating his dearest supporters. The question, for his followers and foes alike, is how far he is willing to go to impose his vision on a country in which thedays of strong-man rule are over.
Ruto, in less than two years in power, has done nothing revolutionary while at the same time being aggressive enough to look like some sort of crusader. Just before and after he was sworn in, lawmakers and other politicians from Odinga’s group were scrambling to join Ruto’s alliance, which now controls the legislature. He has appointed a new security apparatus, including intelligence chiefs whose loyalty to him is unquestionable. And he has driven fear among wealthy elites and the business class with his uncompromising stance on taxes; above all, it is this issue of tax compliance among all Kenyans that has helped shape the image of President Ruto not as a benign, equalizing hustler some believed him to be but as a hard-charging authoritarian with economic targets to meet. Even the hustlers – like the mama mboga who officially proposed his name as a presidential candidate – must pay taxes, and they don’t like it.
Multiple opinion polls show growing discontent with Ruto’s government over what is the most important issue for many Kenyans: the rising cost of living. Notably, one survey by pollster TIFA Research in September 2023 found that most Kenyans did not believe the president was doing enough to address this matter. Ruto recently faced an angry crowd at a rally in Kiambu, a county in the vote rich Mount Kenya area where the president received overwhelming support in the 2022 election. Many there feel Ruto has broken his promises to the voters, and he wa heckled one day in February when he went there with his deputy Rigathi Gachagua, who then rebuked the crowd for appearing to disrespect the head of state.
In his first year in office Ruto signed into law a controversial finance bill that proposed new tax measures. They included hikes in the income tax rate for some salary earners, a 1.5 percent housing tax, a 2.75 percent social insurance fund levy, a 3 percent turnover (gross sales) tax on small businesses, and a doubling of VAT on gasoline to 16 percent. The Federation of Kenya Employers estimates that 70,000 Kenyans have lost their jobs since the Finance Act took effect. The group’s management board in September warned that the cost of-living crisis exacerbated by the new tax measures “threatens our social fabric… Working [people] are getting into a situation where they can hardly afford to meet the health, education, food, and shelter need[s] of their households.”
The new tax measures have proved more toxic amid indications of unnecessary and even extravagant government expenditure. The president, for example, has made so many trips abroad that there is now a Wikipedia page tracking his foreign visits. Gitile Naituli, a professor of governance at Multimedia University of Kenya, told me that the danger for Ruto is that his taxation measures have “left people poorer than he found them” even as revenue collected is perceived to be funding government largesse. The controller of the government’s budget office, an oversight body that looks at public spending, pointed out that the president and his ministers traveled to “fruitless” foreign missions 40 times in their first year in office. Ruto’s focus on taxation has made him the butt of endless jokes, and some Kenyans have labeled him Zakayo, after the biblical tax collector Zacchaeus.
But many Kenyans are really upset with Ruto over tax matters. In January a group of informal workers and traders – the hustlers whose support helped Ruto win the presidency – petitioned the High Court in the coastal town of Malindi seeking monetary compensation from the government for lost busine stemming from their support for Kenya’s ruling coalition. The petitioners included boda-boda operators who cited “massive financial losses” they said rose from being shunned by others who remembered their support for Kenya Kwanza. The petitioners also sought an order restraining Kenya Kwanza as well as Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance party from employing political slogans linking those political groups to boda-boda and mama mboga work.
There have been other suits. In December three jurists from the Mount Kenya area led by Fanya Mambo Kinuthia went to court with allegations that the Kenya Kwanza regime was implementing a sort of “wage slavery” by introducing too many taxes. Their suit claimed that in one year of Ruto’s presidency many Kenyans fell into “the wage slave bracket” despite the prohibition of slavery in Kenya. Remarkably, the suit said:
We contend that excessive taxation is the main reason why wage slavery is becoming institutionalized in Kenya as the incumbent government, supported by its rubber-stamp National Assembly, enacts and enforces new laws to justify deduction of taxes and levies from the income of workers and business owners.
Ruto has defended himself by noting that Kenya would default on its loan obligations if the country did not raise enough revenue internally. National debt, much of it inherited from the previous administration, recently stood at Shs. 10 trillion, or $71 billion. Ruto told reporters in December that 70 percent of government revenue goes into debt service. The alternative to raising taxes, he said, is defaulting on loans. Ruto also has spoken harshly against allegedly uncooperative members of coffee and sugar cartels he is threatening to imprison, deport, or send to “heaven.” Alfred Mang’ula, an independent analyst in Kenya, told me that Ruto should “drop his know-it-all attitude” and listen to technocrats, especially now that it is clear his tax policies “will leave more Kenyans jobless.”
A corollary to Ruto’s singleminded push for tax hikes has been his criticism of judges who rule against his policies. Judges have questioned some of his tax measures, delaying their implementation. In November the High Court in Nairobi ruled that the monthly 1.5 percent housing levy unfairly targeted Kenyans working in the formal sector. The Court of Appeal upheld that decision, pleasing many Kenyans but causing Ruto to accuse the judiciary of “frustrating” his agenda.
Ruto may face yet more resistance from Kenyans. Civil rights activists, opposition figures and ordinary people are increasingly securing orders against controversial projects backed by the president, including a plan to deploy peace-keeping police to the Caribbean nation of Haiti. In January Ruto held a meeting with Chief Justice Martha Koome that was witnessed by National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula. That meeting was initiated by Koome after Ruto publicly criticized the judiciary as a tool of state capture. Earlier in January, speaking at a funeral in the remote area of Nyandarua, Ruto had said he would not tolerate “judicial tyranny and immunity. We must face off with the litigants who file petitions to block the country’s development.” Eric Theuri, president of the Law Society of Kenya, condemned Ruto’s words, which he said could help create “a path that can only lead us to one result and that is anarchy.”
Ruto’s comments drew rebuke even from his strongest supporters. Miguna Miguna, the outspoken attorney who returned from exile after Ruto’s electoral victory, urged the president to stop threatening the judiciary. Writing on the X platform, he told Ruto: “Remember that without the judiciary, you wouldn’t be president.”
Others like Busia Senator Okoiti Omtatah were sharper in their criticism. The long-time human rights activist said Ruto could not afford “to be intoxicated by power,” adding that:
It is clear that any attempt to govern this country outside the boundaries of the law will face staunch resistance. The president should not underestimate this. Regardless of the circumstances, the serpent’s eggs will not be allowed to hatch.
Ruto today is at the peak of his powers – in fact he got there before his inauguration – and he cannot possibly climb higher. But he can transform the summit while he is there. More than any other president of Kenya since the turn of the century, Ruto threatens to change the presidency into the behemoth many Kenyans don’t want it to be. Some Kenyans see his outbursts against the judiciary as a hangover from the days of Moi’s Nyayoism, when the national assembly was weak and the president appointed friendly judges who were not expected to rule against him.
Ruto, who was born into a religious family in Kenya’s Rift Valley region in 1966, entered politics as a youthful campaigner for Moi in the election of 1992, two years after graduating with a degree in botany and zoology from the University of Nairobi. He won a seat in parliament five years later, and briefly served as a government minister near the end of Moi’s presidency. Moi took keen interest in the young man, whom he also gave substantial roles in the Kenya African National Union party. Ruto recently said of Moi, who died in 2020:
He identified me from the university where I was a worship leader and took interest in me. He introduced me to politics, groomed me and inculcated in me the culture of servant leadership.
Many of those who worry about Ruto’s political aims point to the early influence Moi had on young Ruto. “Ruto is no doubt a Moi protégé,” Martin Andati, a political analyst based in Nairobi, told me. “He built his political career in an era where no one could dare challenge the president, who assumed a larger-than-life image. After muzzling parliament, he is now after the judiciary.”
Kenya promulgated a new constitution in 2010 after years of trying and in the aftermath of the 2007-08 post-election violence. It is a strong constitution because it vests power in institutions rather than individuals, and Ruto, as strong as he gets, can still be tamed. Early fears about how his Christian evangelical faith might influence his leadership style – he once said he wanted to make Kenya a “God-fearing nation – have proved unjustified, for even some Church leaders feel he has not met their expectations since taking office. Ruto, whatever he wants to do, “can’t beat all the independent institutions and, again, the levels of enlightenment in Kenya are way ahead to allow anything close to a theocracy or Nyayoism,” according to Andati.
Ruto will almost certainly win a second term, if and when he gets there. One cannot imagine him being voted out of power under any circumstances. And yet, in another sign of his ambition, most recently he has been working to get Odinga elected as the next chairman of the African Union Commission. Why is he doing this? Why is he helping his bitter rival? After all, Ruto and Gachagua had been calling for Odinga’s retirement, sometimes in callous terms.
Victory for Odinga in the African Union leadership race would keep him away from active politics at home for the remainder of his life. Cleophas Malala, the United Democratic Alliance secretary general, says Ruto’s gesture is a patriotic gift to Odinga “for the good of the nation.” But it is also true that Odinga, at 79, is not slowing down and may still be a viable candidate in 2027. Ruto, whether he says it or not, is trying to exile the only opposition figure who could make him a one-term president. At the same time, whatever happens with Odinga afterwards, Ruto loses nothing by appearing magnanimous to his aging rival. ▪