Comedy of errors: Why Ruto has egg on face over jobs

Kenya’s legal fraternity was shocked when, in November 2003, a respected and eminently qualified legal practitioner, Richard Omwela, turned down an appointment by President Mwai Kibaki to serve as a judge of the High Court of Kenya. It was never the done thing. Yet Omwela was only to be the harbinger of what would two decades later become commonplace under Kenya’s fifth President, Dr William Ruto. 

In a short three-year period, President Ruto has suffered nine rebuffs by nominees and appointees to high office in his government. The case of Dr Duncan Ojwang, a legal practitioner and didactic public intellectual, is only the latest debacle in a comedy of high office appointment errors. On Wednesday, Ojwang withdrew his nomination to chair the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR). He cited undisclosed personal reasons, as well as “conflict of interest".

It is instructive that several civil society groups had already objected in court, impugning the appointment as unconstitutional. Among other things, they said that it flew against the gender provisions in the statutes ruling the appointment of the chair and deputy chair to the commission. 

While these snubs are not endemic to the point of a crisis, they still speak to a flawed process of search, nomination and appointment. They speak of procedural carelessness and attitude laxity that leaves President Ruto with a self-administered egg on the face.

Traditionally, presidential appointments in the Kenyan context have been orders to be obeyed. They have not been opinions to be reflected about, nor proposals to be considered. That they could be turned down with alacrity, as we witness today, is most irregular. Indeed, these appointments have customarily been seen to be the crowning glory of many a career. 

There will be hundreds, perhaps thousands or more, eligible professionals who ache for such opportunities. The appointments are treated like favours. The appointing authority, for his part, will carry them on the sleeve. He styles them as favours not just to the appointee, but also to his or her native village and the entire ethnic community. 

Accordingly, many will travel back to hitherto forgotten hamlets, with the eminent city dwellers in tow. They come to celebrate the big job in showy jamborees called “homecomings". For his part, the appointing authority will gloat about the favour. He will parade such persons before his villagers. He must drum home the message of the big favour he has done that village and the ethnic group.  

For its part, the community is expected to reciprocate by aligning itself with the government. It should pledge to lend political support to the President. The appointment is a trade-off. It amounts to inclusion of even the undeserving into government.

The appointments to the Cabinet of John Mbadi (Treasury) and Opiyo Wandai (Energy), have, for instance, led to a thawing of previously often troubled relations between the Ruto government and the Luo Nyanza population. Youth from the Lake counties of Kisumu, Siaya, Homa Bay and Migori were conspicuously absent during this year’s commemoration of last year’s anti-Finance Bill protests, as well as Saba Saba demonstrations. 

Many said in TV footage that they were “now in the government.” They saw no reason to protest against their own government. When you turn down a presidential appointment, therefore, even your community is left wondering why. They see you as a selfish person who is denying them opportunities from the government. It is a country where distribution of development programmes is a privilege that is parcelled out at the will of the national CEO. From then hence, you tow the straight and narrow line of presidential will and whim. 

In the same year that Omwela turned down President Kibaki’s call to him to be a judge of the High Court of Kenya, Dr Willy Mutunga also turned down an appointment to chair the Council of the University of Nairobi. Lawyer Onesimus Githinji declined a presidential appointment to the Judiciary. Such moves were not normal. The media went out on a hunt for them, to try to understand better what was happening. They each cited undisclosed “personal reasons".

Now, with Ruto being slighted nine times, is it time to wonder what is not happening with his process of making nominations and appointments? What does he not do right? Beyond those whom we have cited, it is difficult to remember anyone who declined a presidential appointment during the tenures of Kenya’s first four presidents. 

Clearly the times are changing apace. While it remains very highly respected and venerated, the presidency has lost some of its traditional sheen and mystic. Does this speak to the comportment of the bearer of the office and the brand association they bring to the office? Traditionally, this is a redoubtable office.

The first two holders were, especially, veritable demigods. But they also carried themselves with a dignified sense of mysticism that took home this message. None dared turn them down. President Ruto's unending public quarrels with his adversaries diminish the sheen of this office. He has yet to learn the lesson that ubiquitous presence in the public, complete with a heavy dose of a blustery carriage, will water down the king’s standing, and therefore that of the crown.

Ruto suffered his first blow when, in November 2022, the former West Mugirango MP, Vincent Kemosi, rejected an ambassadorial appointment to Ghana. A similar setback came with the appointment to the same country, nearly two years later, of Margaret Nyambura Ndung’u. She was removed as Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and the Digital Economy and set for Accra, after only three months as CS. She cited personal and family reasons for the snub. 

The most mortifying rebuff, however, was by Law Society of Kenya (LSK) President, Faith Odhiambo, who was gazetted, last July, to chair a Presidential Task Force on Public Debt. The appointment came in the wake of the June 25 climax of Gen-Z anti-Finance Bill protests. There was every indication that both the task force and the appointment were knee-jerk responses to the crisis. They sought to assuage an enraged public. They also sought to silence Odhiambo’s quick-witted and eloquent criticisms against Kenya Kwanza’s excesses and infractions against the people. 

The intrepid Odhiambo came out shooting straight. Declining the appointment, she styled both the offer and the proposed task force as unlawful. The intended tasks resided with the office of the Auditor General, she said. The courts later threw out the task force altogether when civil society took the matter before them. 

Another notable slight came from Justina Wamae, who was in the same July 2024 named to a task force on aligning human resources for health to the Universal Health Coverage Agenda of the Kenya Kwanza government. The same year, former Machakos Town MP Victor Munyaka refused to take up an appointment to chair the Kenya Animal Genetic Resource Centre. He was clear that the political climate in the country was adversarial to the appointment. Kenya Kwanza was still staggering from the blows of the Gen-Z happenings. 

Munyaka told Kenyans that he had not been consulted about the appointment. The President and whoever advises him in these matters, assumed that Munyaka would be excited about the appointment in the usual manner. Such appointees have been known to genuflect and to pay excessive tribute to the President. They ingratiatingly classify the appointment as a great honour to them, their families and tribesmen. 

Separately, Millicent Omanga, a Nairobi politician and former nominated Senator who was a member of the Ruto inner circle during the 2022 election campaigns, rejected her rather belated appointment in 2024. She was supposed to serve on the Nairobi River Service Commission. Against expectation, Omanga had failed to make it to the list of presidential appointments in 2022, when Ruto took over the reins of power. This was surprising for one who would stop at nothing in rooting for Ruto during the campaigns. Did she, perchance, consider the appointment too little, too late?  An earlier appointment as a Chief Administrative Secretary (CAS) fell through when the courts, in 2023, declared the CAS portfolio unconstitutional. Omanga possibly saw the commission job as a slight to her.

The plethora of declined presidential appointments speaks rather clearly to a President who takes things for granted. He appears not to do due diligence or seek advice from his officers. The case of Dr Ojwang is an embarrassment to both the nominee and the appointing authority. Ojwang, a staunch Ruto supporter from Luo Nyanza, was way ahead of the arrival of the broad-based government train.

He has been at great pains to explain the legal conflict in the appointment. The appointment instruments provide that the chair and deputy chair to KNHRC shall not be of the same gender. How Ruto ever ignored this is baffling. He clearly did not consult sufficiently.  Ojwang, himself a distinguished lawyer and teacher of the law, faced the prospect of ignominy and obloquy before the courts on a very transparent matter. He chose to save himself the awkwardness, at the pain of letting down a powerful friend. 

Separately, Hussein Debasso, a former Member of Parliament, declined his appointment to the National Youth Service Council. He did not give the factors behind the rejection, beyond the “personal factors” mantra.  But former Kitutu Chache MP, Timothy Bosire, rejected appointment as a non-executive chair to the National Transport and Safety Authority in January this year almost melodramatically. A buoyant and confident Bosire was on TV screens, stating that he knew nothing of the appointment before its publication in the Kenya Government Gazette. 

Bosire is the national treasurer of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) Party. He stated that the appointment was against his political standing and the interests of his Kisii community. The charismatic straight-shooting politician lost the Kikutu Masaba parliamentary seat to Shadrack Mose of Jubilee in 2017. The present MP is Clive Gisairo, who reclaimed the seat for ODM in 2022. However, Bosire remains a towering figure in the party, even as its fortunes in Kisii take a deep, as a factor of Raila Odinga’s dalliance with President Ruto, in their broad-based government.  At his very latest most remarkable visit to Kisii County, in March this year, Odinga was shouted down by irate youth in Gusii Stadium, because of his amity with Ruto. 

Bosire’s rejection of the Ruto job, only two months earlier, was a slur not just to the President, but to Odinga, too. Whether it was Odinga who proposed Bosire’s name to Ruto, or not, remains unclear. It is very unlikely, however, that an appointment of a senior political party honcho from ODM would be made without the party leader (Mr. Odinga) knowing. Yet, that may not be ruled out altogether, for it seems to be Ruto’s style of doing things. In what sounded almost like self-worship, he recently crowed about his academic and political accomplishments, stating that he was as good as Kenya’s previous four Presidents rolled into one. But he went farther, to allude to the possibility that his rise to power was divinely ordained. His remarks had religious inferences that were rich in messianic allusions. God had anointed him as “the person to save Kenya,” he said.

Messianic illusions are easily the foremost reason President Ruto has often goofed, not just in making appointments that smear him with egg all over the face, but in other impulsive acts and decrees, too. In typical self-worship, he will grin in the middle of a public address, and loudly remind himself and the world that he is the President of Kenya. He will then go on to invite his detractors to come to accept this reality; something that even he does not seem to have accepted.

In the process, he will tell the nation that he is the Commander-in-Chief of the defence forces. He will then go on to issue an edict that skyscrapers of up to 25 floors can now be built adjacent to the Kenya Airforce airbase in Eastleigh. This will then be undermined a few days later, when security experts point out to him the challenges to aircraft take-off and landing, as well as matters of military espionage. If he consulted and sought guidance and wisdom, he would probably spare himself the embarrassment that he now so frequently suffers. 

Of course, Ruto is not the only President whose appointments have been turned down for failing to consult. In the United States, as recently as 2009 Tom Daschle, a former Senate Majority Leader, withdrew before vetting by the Senate as Secretary for Health and Human Services, because of tax issues. Andrew Puzder withdrew after being named Secretary for Labour in the first Trump Government (2017). He cited personal reasons. The pick of the basket was John Quincy Adams, who rejected appointment to the Supreme Court, in 1811. Later, Adams became President of the USA, himself. Regardless, Ruto is our man on the brink. He has so much to review, in both his style and substance.