By OTIENO OTIENO

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President Uhuru Kenyatta’s patience with his renegade deputy William Ruto’s frequent attacks on the administration’s agenda is wearing thin, signalling further pressure in the coming months to try to force the latter out of government.

The duo’s relationship has broken down in the past four years over differences related to President Kenyatta’s succession in 2022, but a constitutional firewall cushions the Deputy President from sacking.

Emboldened officials

Although he has continued to get under his boss’s skin with his public criticism of the administration’s policies, most recently terming the failed constitutional reforms bid as the biggest fraud that ever happened in Kenya, President Kenyatta has until recently largely tolerated Dr Ruto.

But last week President Kenyatta appeared to suggest that he has had enough.

His challenge to Dr Ruto, with whom they ran for the presidency on a joint Jubilee Alliance party ticket, to resign during a State House interview with editors emboldened administration officials to take their most drastic action against the Deputy President so far — downgrading security at his official residence and disclosing details of his security and wealth in Parliament.

Trappings of power

The disclosures made by Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i before the National Assembly Committee on Security and National Administration on Wednesday showed that Dr Ruto, although publicly sidelined from government over the past four years, still enjoys the trappings of power with 257 police officers guarding him and family members, his official and private residences and some of his vast private property across the country.

Dr Ruto’s wealth, according to the list released by the Interior minister, includes expansive ranches, hotels in Nairobi and Mombasa, a multi-million shilling poultry farm and five helicopters parked on two reserved hangars at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport.

Hustler populist narrative

Cases of senior officials or prominent politicians having details of their private property being made public in this manner are extremely rare in Kenya.

With legal restrictions still placed on publishing details of wealth declarations, Kenyans only occasionally get to know about the vast wealth accumulated by public officials from succession battles or court cases filed by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

After initially protesting through terse statements by his aides, Dr Ruto has since sought to play down the revelation of his personal property in Parliament, saying he only owns about 70 percent of what was linked to him by Interior ministry officials. On Thursday, he was also more forthcoming with information about his wealth during a campaign meeting at his official residence, telling the audience that he also owns shares in Kenya’s telecommunications giant Safaricom and national carrier Kenya Airways.

But for a man who is campaigning for the presidency on a populist social class platform that promises to liberate the poor from the rich, the Deputy President may find it much harder to repair the damage inflicted by the disclosure of his vast wealth.

One of the hotels linked to him is at the centre of a court case in which the government is seeking to repossess the land on which it is built.

As expected, rival campaigns have inundated social media platforms with propaganda messaging portraying Dr Ruto as a fake ‘Hustler’ — a play on his populist narrative about the 2022 presidential election being a battle between him, the son of a peasant, and the country’s political dynasty class.

The dynasty tag is widely perceived to be referring to the coalition being built by President Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose fathers were Independent Kenya’s first president and vice-president respectively.

Even more worrying for Dr Ruto will be the emerging resolve by administration officials eager to put him on the back foot and publicly embarrass him into quitting.