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It’s intriguing what Rigathi Gachagua, aka Riggy G, did to Prezzo Bill Ruto’s ears, but it seems he’s been hard of hearing since. It doesn’t matter who’s speaking and how; Prezzo Ruto simply won’t pay any heed to Kenyans’ remonstrations over his coarse language.
So, hoisted on his vehicle’s sunroof, he’s been howling in the wind, and any appeals for calm have only elicited more decibels. It’s safe to say, as Riggy G claimed recently, the opposition has Prezzo Ruto where they always wanted: in the political pigsty.
I will not repeat the slurs that Prezzo Ruto has been howling since Riggy G mimicked his earlobes and that weighty issue of diminishing body weight, despite the enormous “eating.”
The Bill Ruto that Kenyans have seen in recent days is a departure from the man who sat, in early September 2022, sucked at his lips as he signed a presidential decree dispatching Kenyan policemen to Haiti. He was offering himself as the new African statesman.
In that very week, or it could be earlier, it’s simply impossible to keep track of all the decrees that he signed into law. American biotech companies were lining up to truck their suspect GMO concoctions, even before a regulatory framework could be put in place.
In the coming year, Prezzo Ruto addressed the United Nations General Assembly, delivering kizungu mingi that meant nothing really, before sitting at Joe Biden’s desk at the White House, grinning from ear to ear.
The joke among more enlightened Africans, those who studied history and politics, not botany and zoology, as did Prezzo Ruto, was the irony of a black man sitting at his master’s seat and regaling about it. Then came June 2024, and the globe-trotting Prezzo was rattled by the Gen-Z protests, resulting in a panicky retreat that saw Raila Odinga roped in to help steer the State from capitulation. The façade of the great African statesman had come tumbling down.
Prezzo Ruto has been on a slippery incline since, and his purported rise to the continent’s leadership came a cropper. Nothing amplifies this better than the events in New York this week.
As Prezzo Ruto howled in the wind about unnamed folks who impregnate young lasses and “kill” them or their offspring, a debasing diatribe for sure, or the spectre of “useless” and “brainless” opposition seeking his ouster, the proper leaders of Africa were seeking restitution and reparations for the continent after 300 years of the slave trade.
Thanks to Ghanaian Prezzo John Mahama, the United Nations endorsed a significant resolution in remembrance of the millions of Africans who were trafficked into slavery. Predictably, the United States and Israel were two of the three nations opposed to the resolution. Britain, our former colonial master, abstained, for obvious reasons.
The declaration of slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity” is not an academic exercise; it is a pointed rejection of Western erasure and amnesia of white crimes committed on black bodies. That was the stunning rebuke that Prezzo Mahama delivered on Donald Trump, the American warmonger that Prezzo Ruto fawned over on his last trip to Washington.
To apply Prezzo Ruto’s colourful lingo, “brainless” politicos without any sense of their past have impoverished African nations by robbing them blind, only to stash the loot in Swiss banks. Alternatively, they use such proceeds of crime to buy designer shoes and Savile Row suits. Or sending their “brainless” offspring to private academies in Europe to learn about tenderprenuership.
Within this prism, our politics is pretty primitive, and our leaders’ purported claim to continental leadership is a figment of our imagination. What’s remarkable is Prezzo Ruto’s slide from his lofty perch three years ago, when the spring in his walk was suddenly deflated by domestic politics. The latest assault from Riggy G appears to have punctured more than just ear lobes.
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By Peter Kimani