Distant wars and Ruto’s battle at home

With some of the protesters declaring that President William Ruto’s government must be made a “wantam” (one term) administration, we are likely to see the crisis set off by the US-Israel February attack on Iran become a major issue in the Kenya elections late next year if the conflict drags into 2027.

It will further highlight how Kenyan elections tend to coincide with wider global disruptions, and how in turn they affect outcomes.

This vulnerability to far-off global shocks is an old ghost in Kenyan politics.

Look at the December 2002 election, which finally broke the independence party KANU’s 24-year stranglehold on power. 

The trouble actually began in 1998, when al-Qaeda bombed the US embassy in Nairobi, an attack that crippled the country’s vital tourism sector overnight.

As Kenya struggled to rebuild, the global tech industry imploded with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, triggering a Western stock market crash that squeezed foreign investment.

Then came the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States by al-Qaeda, which severely grounded global aviation and brought down a heavy blanket of Western travel advisories.

By late 2002, the Kenyan economy was starved of foreign exchange and choked by a global downturn, turning voters’ anxiety into a furious, collective demand for change that swept Mwai Kibaki into State House.

Five years later, the connection between global markets and local crises became even more direct.

Ahead of the December 2007 election, the US subprime mortgage market collapsed, sending a massive credit shock through Western banks and setting off the global financial crisis.

In Kenya, among others, this international shock manifested as a surge in the cost of imported fuel and fertiliser.

When the electoral commission announced a deeply flawed presidential result handing Kibaki victory, this economically desperate, angry population formed the frontline of a radicalised explosion.

The financial fallout fed directly into a localised nightmare that left over 1,400 people dead and 600,000 displaced from their homes.

By the 2013 vote, the global landscape had shifted again. The world was dealing with the slow, agonising hangover of the Eurozone debt crisis, which flattened European demand for Kenya’s premium exports like tea, cut flowers, and tourism.

Facing isolation from Western powers due to International Criminal Court charges, newly elected Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto responded by shifting Kenya’s economic strategy away from traditional Western markets, looking instead toward Asian capital, specifically China, to fund massive infrastructural borrowing.

The 2017 election cycle came on the back of a dramatic slowdown in China’s economic growth, combined with the devaluation of the yuan and a severe crash in global oil prices, which sent shockwaves through emerging economies.

Voters went to the polls in August 2017 embittered by food shortages and skyrocketing prices for basic goods, and an economy beginning to be weighed down by debt.

The government’s ability to offer relief was constrained.

The result? It re-arranged the internal balance of power that partly emboldened the Supreme Court to hand out the historic first nullification of the presidential vote.

Yet, there is no greater masterclass in exploiting global crisis than William Ruto’s 2022 presidential campaign.

Kenya was emerging from the wreckage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Just as the country tried to find its footing, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, cutting off global supplies of grain and fertiliser and sending oil prices into the stratosphere.

The Uhuru Kenyatta-Raila Odinga Azimio alliance was left holding the bag, forced to defend a crashing economy and soaring cost of living.

Ruto cleverly seized the moment, turning the economic fallout of Covid and the Ukraine war into a political weapon. He framed the high price of unga and fuel as the direct fault of a detached, dynastic ruling elite, a narrative that won him the presidency.

Now, history is repeating itself. If the war drags into 2027, for Kenya it means the current street protests are merely a preview of the political battles ahead.

Ruto will point to the flames in the Middle East to explain the economic stress of citizens.

But as he, as much as anyone else will know, hungry voters rarely look at international maps when they cast their ballots; they look at the price of bread at the local supermarket.