Prof Makau has joined school of scandal as a revolution unfolds

I will not make any harsh judgement against Prof Makau Mutua. My comrade-in-arms in our youth has now joined the ever expanding landscape of President William Ruto’s senior advisors. I will not impute ill-motive on his part. But this I will say, he is lost.  

I was in Dar es Salaam – specifically at the University of Dar es Salaam – when I saw President Ruto’s social media post. He was all glee. “I have appointed Prof Makau Mutua the Senior Advisor of Constitutional Affairs in the Office of the President,” Dr Ruto crowed, savoured the pleasures of catching this one individual who vowed, in the public media, never to work for Ruto. “No, never, nyet!” he said.  

We each learn our own way. At our own pace, in our own time. Once long ago I meddled with Dr Ruto. We helped him – others and I – to position the infamous bottom up agenda. We were the ideologues. He was our project. We thought Ruto understood poverty. He would know how to lift the poor, and rise with them. We were ideological romantic idiots. We thought we would reify pro-people development theories that we had picked up in postgraduate development communications classes.  

The time had come to abandon trickledown approaches that demonised the poor for being poor. What a golden chance to bring to life stuff we had picked up from senior theorists like Daniel Lerner, Wilbur Schramm, Ernst Schumacher, Paulo Freire, and the lot. We would shame Everett Rogers and his dominant paradigm of diffusion of innovations, from the top to the bottom, we thought. Ruto was our best dribbler, our star player.  

We delivered him to State House. And that was the beginning of the end of our bottom up agenda. Either it was thrown overboard. Or, he simply didn’t understand what he was talking about during the campaigns. I personally gave up on our good within his first year in office. He was clearly running a felonious entity. To his credit, Makau Mutua refrained from demonising my hobnobbing with Ruto. I will be a gentleman. I will pay him back in his own coins. I will reject the notion that he has joined Ruto “to eat.” But he is wrong.  

Wrong side of history

It is banal to say “he has gone to eat.” Mutua does not lack. Accordingly, let me give him the benefit of this doubt. He probably believes that, together with other ODM political migrants, they will turn the direction of Ruto’s ship of State. The bad news is they will not. Together with their boss, Raila Odinga, they are on the wrong side of history.  

The Kenya Kwanza government is not about the people and their popular struggles. It is about the leaders and their lavish appetites. They are difficult appetites to feed, going by the daily reports that emerge from that space. This government is the school of scandal, sleeping in the middle of a popular revolution. When you join them, you become like them. That is unless you wake up and smell the coffee, and run away very fast. Prof Makau has just signed the manifesto of opprobrium.  

But why do I tell you that I was in Dar es Salaam when the news broke? It is the irony of everything. First, I was in Africa’s liberation headquarters with a slew of Africa’s topmost social science scholars, mulling about academic and intellectual freedom. Organised under the aegis of the Council for Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), we were reflecting on the state of the art, 25 years after the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility.  

Dar, Africa’s home of liberation movements is just the right place for this task. Indeed, in the early 1980s, it gave refuge to Mutua and a cocktail of others who were my contemporaries at the University of Nairobi. We were brass young people. Across the continent, we believed we had a mission, to “free our nations from the chains of neo-colonialism and international capitalism.” The government did not waste time on us.

The more visibly vocal types found themselves on the highroad. That was how Mutua found himself in Dar. Another Steve Bantu Biko, suffering for his people. He has retained that brand from the morning that, together with six others, they left my house in Ofafa Jericho for Dar.

While Dar still upholds the vision, Nairobi has faltered. And now Steve Biko has written on his X handle that he will serve, not the people, but Big Brother, William Ruto. He is lost, as is Raila Odinga. 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.  www.barrackmuluka.co.ke