The Mt Kenya Times 
President William Ruto
By: Midmark Onyonka Onsongo
Kenya woke up today in a strange kind of silence not the calm of peace, but the hush that comes before a nation coughs blood. In that silence, the truth sat heavily in the air: President William Ruto has become the very thing we once feared, the shadow we thought we’d buried in the dark pages of history. He has not just failed to lead he has chosen to rule, and there’s a dangerous difference. Today is not about what happened or didn’t. It’s about what we’ve become under him what we are being turned into and the growing realization that this presidency has curdled into a parody of itself. Ruto did not inherit a perfect nation, but he took an aching one and twisted the knife. And just like Moi in the beginning, he cloaks oppression in religious language, stages optimism in expensive jackets, and tours the country not to listen, but to lecture. He has perfected the art of speaking like a man of the people while governing like a man above them. In less than three years, the dream he sold has mutated into a nightmare he denies. And today, as the streets stayed eerily quiet, and the youth watched with clenched jaws, it became painfully obvious: Ruto has broken the covenant he made with the Kenyan people.
He did not rise to power on merit, but on promise a promise to lift the hustler, to flatten the pyramid, to build from the bottom up. And yet, what do we see? A man so obsessed with power he now fears his own people. His government has become an organism that eats its children and blames them for bleeding. He promised to fight corruption, yet corruption now wears perfume and sits in his cabinet meetings. He said he would lower the cost of living, yet everything from bread to books to breath has become more expensive. The taxes choke. The debts balloon. And the state responds with coldness, arrogance, and selective deafness. Today wasn’t quiet because the people are satisfied it was quiet because the people are exhausted. And exhaustion is more dangerous than rage, because it signals the final stage of belief. That space where citizens no longer hope for justice but prepare for survival.
What we are witnessing is not just a political miscalculation, but a full-blown betrayal of the republic. Ruto had a chance to be different, to turn the tide, to end the curse of personality cults and dynastic greed. But instead, he chose to resurrect it. His presidency is increasingly Moi’s first term in another jacket: centralization of power, intelligence-led intimidation, silencing of dissent, sacralizing the presidency with church pulpits, and appointing loyalists with questionable ethics as if this nation is his inheritance. Every promise has unraveled into a punchline. The “hustler nation” is a ghost. The “bottom-up” model is a fiction. What remains is a man drunk on power, surrounded by praise singers, insulated by billionaires, and disconnected from the ground that raised him. He tours like a tourist in his own country, offering platitudes to people who need policy. His speeches have become sermons that comfort no soul and solve no crisis.
And while he dances from county to county under heavy escort, hospitals rot, schools crumble, and young men hang on the edge of despair. He speaks of investment while the youth count days like jail terms, wondering if their lives are collateral damage in a president’s rise to wealth. Like Moi in the 1980s, Ruto has started building castles in a burning nation. You cannot preach patriotism to a hungry people. You cannot threaten the young into silence when you’ve robbed them of opportunity. You cannot hide behind choirs and crusades when the stench of your governance reeks across the land. The comparison to Moi is not poetic. It is political. It is personal. We are watching the resurrection of authoritarianism this time dressed in democratic clothes. But power that does not listen becomes power that gets removed if not by ballot, then by history.
Today reminded us that the biggest threat to Kenya is no longer tribalism it is betrayal. Betrayal of the youth who campaigned for a future and were handed a funeral. Betrayal of the working class who rose at 4am to vote, only to go to bed jobless. Betrayal of the student who took HELB loans with dreams and now stares at a country with no plan. Betrayal of the common citizen who believed that the man from Sugoi would understand the pain of poverty, only to realize that power doesn’t change people it reveals them. What we now know is that Ruto was never the alternative. He was the continuation. A sharper Moi. A digital-era autocrat. A hustler who hustled the nation.
And what comes next is no longer a mystery. The people will not wait forever. There is a new mood in the country, one that no PR stunt can erase. The fear is wearing off. The silence is maturing into strategy. From TikTok lives to encrypted organizing, Kenyans are preparing. They may not be in the streets today, but the streets are in them. The youth are studying the regime like a chessboard. The questions are getting sharper. The satire is getting more biting. And what we are seeing is not a breakdown but a buildup. A buildup of discontent, of lessons learned, of civic consciousness refusing to die. Let it be known that no president in Kenya’s history was given as much benefit of the doubt as William Ruto. He was handed goodwill, trust, and even sympathy. But he wasted it all on extravagance, arrogance, and religious smokescreens. Now the nation watches him not as a savior, but as a suspect. A suspect in the slow murder of hope. Today’s silence was not peace it was indictment. It was a people slowly building their case against a man who promised transformation but delivered trauma. A man who is starting to resemble Moi not just in style, but in the consequences his regime will surely face. History will ask where we were when the country began choking under polished tyranny. And we will say: we were watching, we were warning, we were writing. The people are not confused. They are waiting. And Ruto should know once the people rise, there will be no mountain high enough to hide in, no bishop holy enough to defend him, no slogan loud enough to drown out the cries of a betrayed nation.
Scripted by;
MIDMARK ONYONKA ONSONGO,SGS
(Socio-Geographer)
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