William Samoei Ruto is not a Serpent but a Servant

A lot of misconceptions surround the new Rutos party, URP. According to registrar of parties, URP stands for United Republican Party not ‘Ukiona Ruto Potea’. Today a cartoon in the Daily nation depicted Ruto as a serpent.  This does not shock me at all. Last week the Nation media group gave a total blackout to William Ruto during the launch of his new political vehicle, URP. If you asked me, and it is a good thing you did not ask, Ruto is the most-maligned yet well-meaning politician this country has ever produced. He is the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be. But journalists and commentators continue to ignore his numerous successes, which far outnumber the few infractions he has that are always blown out of proportion. Often, they deliberately fail to see Ruto’s brightest sides and are hell-bent on bringing him down whenever he sets on, well, setting milestones, overcoming hurdles or going over a cliff to meet other ‘hustlers’.

Had it not been for Ruto, we would not have known about coached witnesses to the ICC and how they were housed in the lap of luxury that we were probably paying for. Thus, apart from saving us some little money, he also opened our eyes to the shenanigans of some human rights bodies and how their commissioners were uprooting hard-working peasants from villages and setting them up in highrise apartments in the city.

That done, Mr Ruto then set his sights on The Hague, where he stood up for the rights of all Kenyans, young and old, hustlers, rustlers, blushers, blusters et al.While his other colleagues at the ICC just sat there, befuddled and mum while condescendingly being read what was left of their rights, the Eldoret North MP became the voice of the voiceless millions of Kenyans who wanted to tell the ICC a thing or two about jurisprudence. No politician has stopped other wayward politicians in their tracks the way Ruto has.

Then there is KANU, ODM and UDM, which were likely to grow into monolithic dictatorial behemoths but Ruto nipped them in the bud, cut them down to size and made them pale shadows of their former selves by decamping with millions of their members to whichever political vehicle he chose. Who says he is not a man of the masses? You cannot talk about Ruto without mentioning YK’92, a political outfit that increased the rate of employment for the youth and gave us higher prices for our agricultural produce in the ’90s. That is why, had he stayed on at the helm of the Ministry of Agriculture, the food shortages we experienced last year would have been a thing of the past.

But trust Ruto’s detractors, who saw his success with the masses as a threat to their waning political careers. They not only engineered his being dropped from the Kitchen Cabinet, but also spread malicious lies about his dealings and made him a sacrificial lamb at the altar of an over-zealous ICC prosecutor who wanted to make Kenya an example, albeit a bad one. Also, Ruto was made the villain of Mau and Ngong forests as his baiters tried to make the legal land owners homeless. But the man was unstoppable in championing the rights of the downtrodden and held fundraisers for the displaced, the homeless, the landless, the foodless and other victims of GoK’s lethargy.

A self-made man who undoubtedly admires his maker, Ruto’s achievements in just one day can fill newspapers and news bulletins for years.