Kenyan presidential hopeful William Ruto promised on Wednesday that if elected, he will make all Kenyan government contracts with China public, and move aggressively to deport Chinese nationals working illegally in Kenya.
Ruto, 55, is currently the deputy president of Kenya. He is running for the presidency on an anti-corruption platform that stresses his own hardscrabble youth, during which he sold chickens to make a living and did not own a pair of shoes until he was 15. His party, the Kenya Kwanza Alliance (“Kenya First”), is a somewhat unstable coalition of smaller parties united primarily by their disdain for incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Ruto has been Kenyatta’s deputy president since 2013, a relationship he now dismisses as a political marriage of convenience. It was actually something of a shotgun wedding, because Kenyatta and Ruto – who backed Kenyatta’s rival Raila Odinga at first – were both under investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Both men were accused of fomenting violence that led to over 1,200 deaths after the bitterly contested 2007 election.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, before the meeting at the Great Hall of People in Beijing, China on April 25, 2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Kyodo News – Pool/Getty Images)
The Kenyatta-Ruto “bromance” achieved its goals, as the two were able to get all of the charges against them thrown out after three years in power. In 2018, Kenyatta reconciled with Odinga and abruptly dumped Ruto, who was accused of insubordination for complaining about it. Ruto remained deputy president for the duration of his constitutionally-guaranteed tenure, knowing full well that he would be tossed out in favor of Odinga in the August 2022 elections.
Ruto decided to run for the top job himself, on a platform of rebuilding the Kenyan economy from the ground up to better serve “hustler nation,” as he refers to young Kenyans who cannot find solid jobs. Kenya’s youth unemployment rate hovers around 40 percent.
Ruto is running heavily against corruption, even though he has been credibly accused of corruption himself – he has trouble explaining how he became so wealthy during a life of public service and owns a spectacular amount of real estate for a man who used to run a roadside chicken stand, a hundred acres of which he lost in 2013 to a farmer who accused him of stealing it.
One of Ruto’s main issues is “state capture,” by which he means private interests infiltrating the government and using public office to enrich themselves. He and his running mate Rigathi Gachagua are rather vague about precisely what state capture entails, who is guilty of it, and what penalty they should face.
On Thursday, Ruto strongly implied President Kenyatta is guilty of participating in state capture but said he has “no intention” of prosecuting Kenyatta if he defeats the incumbent in August. On the same day, surrogates for Odinga’s Azimio party declared they would eagerly investigate Ruto for corruption if they win the presidency.
Since just about every Kenyan party accuses its rivals of corruption, Ruto staked out some novel ground for himself on Wednesday by promising to go after China, which holds about $8 billion of Kenya’s skyrocketing national debt.
Much of that debt was piled up during Kenyatta’s wild “infrastructure” spending spree, financed by unwise loans from Chinese banks. The details of those loans have been kept secret until now, despite numerous efforts to make them public through lawsuits. The Kenyatta government claims the Chinese contracts came with iron-clad non-disclosure laws, and violating them might jeopardize Kenyan national security by angering Beijing.
Ruto has said he does not intend to restructure Kenya’s debt, although making those Chinese contracts public would be a vital first step toward doing so. Kenya is clearly struggling to make payments on those loans and China has rejected requests from Kenya to defer repayment on the grounds that the Wuhan coronavirus devastated the Kenyan economy.
Ruto and his party could be banking on public anger surging in their favor if the debt details are made public, as critics of the Kenyatta administration believe those Chinese-funded projects tended to be overpriced and more likely to generate more debt than profits.
As for Ruto’s comments about illegal Chinese workers, Kenya periodically arrests various foreign nationals for entering the country and working without the necessary permits, and the culprits are often Chinese. In one controversial case from late 2020, a group of Chinese chefs caught on video whipping a Kenyan waiter turned out to be illegals.
Kenya’s working class is sensitive to illegal employees taking their jobs, especially after most of the good jobs from those fantastically expensive BRI projects went to Chinese workers instead of Kenyans. Chinese managers had an ugly habit of abusing the Kenyans who did get hired to complete the infrastructure projects.