Why Candidate Ruto must walk his loud integrity talk

Deputy President William Ruto makes fine speeches in explaining what has gone wrong or not done in a manner that meets his expectations with the government that pays him a salary.

But as holder of the second-highest public office in the land, he has access to intelligence, information and contacts that ordinary folks do not. These privileges give him a great deal of access about goings-on in government and analyses on implications in policy, programmes and projects.

Ordinary citizens listening to him assume he speaks with authority, knowledge and out of genuine concern when he declares that he would have done a better job had he not been “denied the free rein” to coordinate and direct things. Since he fell out with his boss, President Uhuru Kenyatta, Dr Ruto seems to have lost his sense of balance, decorum and good taste for someone seeking the highest office to become Kenya’s diplomat-in-chief.

In his latest expression of visceral bitterness, he publicly protested that nobody should fault him for incessantly badmouthing the government that faithfully hands him a fat pay cheque every month.

Responding to the President’s Labour Day speech, in which the Head of State called him out for spending his waking hours inciting the public against the government while offering no alternative advice to mitigate his complaints, Dr Ruto retorted that his job had been taken away and given to others. But he neglected to respond to the challenge thrown at him about his moral duty of care to the taxpayer and the nation in addition to his constitutional obligations as principal assistant to the President.

That makes one wonder if Ruto realised the admission he made to the long-suffering tax payers: That he collects a salary for work not done and is okay with it. A balanced moral probity and sense of patriotic duty demands that the interests of the citizens supersede the personal pecuniary benefits of an individual seeking the job of chief executive of the nation. His response implies, in his order of moral priorities, his pay is an automatic entitlement.

 If the interest of the citizens he hopes will vest in him the presidency ranked higher in his moral spectrum, it would be a mark of patriotic duty to decline the payslip than make lame excuses.  Many politicians like styling themselves as patriots motivated by high ideals and calling to lead a people to a better life. But one’s record, not words, confirms one as such or consigns them to the company of charlatans and quislings driven by pecuniary impulses.

Kenya’s contemporary history is not without examples of patriots who set the bar high in the noble service of higher ideals of the common good regardless of personal danger, cost or loss. They include generations of Independence struggle leadership cadres and their compatriots, who watered the dream that their children’s children will live free of colonial subjugation with their own blood.

Leaders should be held to a higher integrity yardstick. If Ruto is so blind to the contradictions, how does he conduct himself away from the public eye?