Enemy of the People

There is a way a country begins to know that its President no longer feels answerable to it. It is not always dramatic. There is no siren, no formal announcement, no Cabinet memo titled betrayal. It begins quietly. A secretive arrangement here. A tax there. A dead woman explained away as another incident. A missing child returned to the parents as their private panic. A fuel price announced in the clean language of regulation, while kitchens go silent across the republic. That is where William Ruto has brought Kenya. The tragedy is that he did not arrive here as a stranger to suffering. On the contrary, he campaigned as the man who understood the poor. He spoke the language of the roadside trader, the boda boda rider, the unemployed graduate and the mother who stretches two hundred shillings until it becomes supper, fare and hope. He knew the wound. He touched it with political tenderness. Yet, once power was safely in his hands, the wound became useful. The hustler stopped being the moral centre of his politics and became a revenue stream. That betrayal is what makes the Ebola affair so disturbing. Reuters has reported that Kenya approved a United States plan to open a quarantine facility for Americans exposed to Ebola, with American officials saying the site would be at a Kenyan air force base in Laikipia. Kenya’s health ministry has spoken of discussions and protocols, but the public has still not received the clear, complete account it deserves To be clear, no civilised person mocks disease. Americans exposed to Ebola deserve care. Health workers deserve protection. Public health cooperation can be an act of humanity. Yet cooperation cannot be used to smuggle secrecy into public life. Kenya is not the servant quarter of American fear. If Washington does not want Ebola risk on American soil, Ruto has no moral right to make Kenya the convenient answer to that fear without full disclosure, parliamentary scrutiny, local consent and a serious public health plan. This matters because the insult is larger than the facility itself. The insult is the possibility that Kenyans may be carried into risk without being treated as citizens worthy of truth. It is the familiar arrogance of a government that speaks warmly abroad and impatiently at home. For foreign capitals, there is polish, availability and reassurance. For Kenyans, there is always a lecture waiting. Be patient. Pay more. Understand the economy. Trust the process. Sacrifice today. Tomorrow will be better. Meanwhile, tomorrow keeps postponing itself. Women know this postponement well. Kenya keeps burying them, one terrible headline after another. A 2025 Femicide Report recorded at least 220 women and girls killed in Kenya, many by people they knew and trusted, often after warning signs had already appeared. A country does not run out of women by accident. It fails them first. It fails them at the police station, where threats are dismissed as domestic noise. It fails them in prosecution, where urgency dies in files. It fails them in shelter policy, where escape is too often a privilege. It fails them in public speech, where dead women receive more sympathy than living women receive protection. Ruto may not hold the knife, but he presides over the State that keeps arriving after the blood has dried. The same failure follows the child into danger. Government data reported through the Child Protection Information Management System recorded 10,581 child protection cases between January 2025 and March 2026, including abandonment, abductions, missing children cases and trafficking. Then, almost predictably, officials tell parents to be vigilant. Of course parents must be vigilant. But mothers are not police stations. Fathers are not prosecutors. Neighbours are not immigration officers. A State that collects tax with the appetite of a hawk cannot protect children with the energy of a tired volunteer. From there, the line to the cost of living is not difficult to draw. A government that treats public safety casually will also treat public hardship abstractly. Fuel is the clearest example. In Nairobi, EPRA’s May to June pricing cycle placed super petrol at KSh 214.25, diesel at KSh 242.92 and kerosene at KSh 152.78. Fuel is not a pump figure. It is fare to work. It is milk. It is unga. It is the price of getting a sick child to hospital. It is the trader wondering whether profit survived the journey from market to estate. It is the worker choosing between movement and supper. When fuel rises, the poor do not revise a spreadsheet. They remove something from life. That is the cruelty of the hustler betrayal. Ruto asked the poor to see themselves in him. Now they see themselves on his invoice. read more...