Kenya is sometimes such an extraordinary country that one begins to suspect we are not merely living through history; we are simultaneously producing content. And President William Ruto, quite inadvertently perhaps, occasionally rises to the level of a content creator of exceptional comic timing. Consider this remarkable piece of presidential counsel: “If you choose a thief and expect that they will not steal from you, you are not being intelligent. If you choose somebody who is incompetent and expect them to deliver on anything, then you are not being serious. If you choose a person who has no vision, who has no plan, who has no agenda, and expect them to take your country anywhere, then you are not being serious.” Now, fairness requires an immediate caveat. The President may mean every syllable sincerely, and he presumably has somebody else entirely in mind. But therein lies the difficulty, because a considerable portion of his Kenyan audience may listen to those words and wonder whether somebody accidentally switched the presidential camera from rear-facing to selfie mode.
For the mental picture is irresistible. Imagine the President standing before an enormous mirror, addressing Kenyans with complete presidential composure. He points sternly at the mirror and declares, “If you choose a thief…” The mirror points back. He continues, “If you choose somebody incompetent…” The mirror remains remarkably attentive. Then comes the crescendo: “If you choose somebody with no vision, no plan, no agenda…” At this point, somewhere across the republic, millions of Kenyans are no longer listening to an ordinary political speech. They are watching what appears, from their end of the screen, to be a televised performance appraisal of the gentleman standing before the mirror. The President knows whom he means. The audience knows whom it thinks the description resembles. And the mirror, displaying considerably greater political discipline than most Kenyans, says absolutely nothing. It merely reflects.
Yet watching the clip produces another mental picture almost as irresistible as the mirror. President Ruto appears to be handling those words with the devastating dexterity of a basketball wizard tormenting a hapless defender. I once watched one of those extraordinary exhibitions in which a supremely gifted basketballer, having apparently exhausted the conventional possibilities of dribbling between his legs, around his back and through every conceivable angle, actually began bouncing the ball off his bewildered challenger and straight back into his own hands, reducing the poor fellow from opponent to temporary sporting equipment. Watching this presidential clip produces something uncannily similar. “If you choose a thief…” Bounce! Off the Kenyan populace and back towards Ruto. “If you choose somebody incompetent…” Bounce! Off the bewildered defender and somehow straight back towards the presidential hand. “If you choose somebody with no vision, no plan, no agenda…” Bounce, crossover, behind the back, off Kenya again and apparently back towards the original ball-handler. The rhetorical dexterity is almost mesmerising. The hapless Kenyan citizen stands there trying to follow the ball, only gradually realizing that although every bounce appears intended for somebody else, the ball keeps returning with uncanny obedience towards the gentleman who released it.
And perhaps that is what makes the spectacle so devastatingly funny. Ruto delivers each proposition outward with tremendous confidence, almost bouncing it upon the Kenyan audience as though saying, Look carefully at the kind of people you must never elect. Yet the Kenyan listener, battered by one rhetorical bounce after another, may increasingly find himself wanting to interrupt the exhibition and ask: “Mr President, why does the ball keep coming back to you?” For this begins to resemble rhetorical basketball of an unusually advanced order, in which the President supplies the ball, performs the crossover, provides the commentary, announces the rules of the game and, quite inadvertently perhaps, keeps returning possession to himself. By the time he reaches thieves, incompetence, absence of vision, absence of plans and absence of agenda, the bewildered Kenyan defender hardly needs to attempt a steal. He can simply stand still and watch the ball complete its extraordinary circuit.
But beneath this magnificent comedy lies something considerably more profound, because Scripture contains extraordinary episodes in which human words escape the immediate intentions of those who utter them and acquire a significance their speakers apparently never contemplated. Pontius Pilate ordered an inscription placed above the crucified Christ: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” When the chief priests protested and demanded that he alter it to say merely that Jesus claimed to be King of the Jews, Pilate gave that magnificent and immovable answer: “What I have written, I have written” (John 19:19–22). Pilate presumably thought he was settling an irritating administrative dispute, yet above the Cross of Calvary, written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the Roman governor had caused the kingship of the very Man Rome was executing to be proclaimed before the world. Pilate wrote the notice, history preserved it, and Providence supplied an irony whose dimensions Pilate himself could scarcely have understood.
Nor was Pilate alone. Caiaphas, calculating the political expediency of eliminating Jesus, declared that it was better that “one man should die for the people” than that the whole nation perish. Then Scripture adds the astonishing commentary that “this spake he not of himself” but, being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation (John 11:49–52). Caiaphas meant political elimination; God was accomplishing redemption. The man understood one dimension of his sentence; heaven understood another. He knew what he wanted to say, but he did not know everything his words were saying. The speaker possessed the tongue, but he did not possess the ultimate significance of everything that proceeded from it.
And then Scripture becomes almost comical itself. Balaam, a prophet for hire rushing headlong down a forbidden road, could not see the angel of the LORD standing before him, sword drawn, but his donkey could (Numbers 22:21–35). Balaam therefore began beating the animal for refusing to proceed, while the supposedly dumb creature was actually the only participant in the immediate drama behaving rationally. Then God opened the donkey’s mouth. Peter later summarizes the episode with devastating economy: “the dumb ass speaking with man’s voice forbad the madness of the prophet” (2 Peter 2:16, KJV). Consider the humiliation embedded in that scene. A celebrated seer had become spiritually blinder than his transport. The prophet had the reputation; the donkey had the eyesight. The prophet possessed the vocabulary; the donkey possessed the discernment. And when the prophet could no longer recognize the madness of the road upon which he was travelling, God commandeered the mouth of the creature beneath him to restrain the madness of the man sitting above it.
That biblical episode should make every human being, particularly every person entrusted with power, exceedingly humble about the sovereignty of God over human speech. Scripture repeatedly shows that God is not imprisoned by the intentions, understanding or even spiritual condition of the instrument before Him. He can make a pagan governor write more than he understands, a calculating high priest speak more than he intends, and a donkey perceive what a prophet cannot see. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). When God wishes to expose human folly, therefore, He has never suffered from a shortage of instruments, and neither rank nor office nor reputation guarantees that the person doing the speaking understands the entire significance of what has just proceeded from his own mouth.
Which brings us, with considerable theological caution and even greater amusement, back to Kenya. We need not declare that President Ruto was prophesying, nor should we presume to announce the secret counsels of God concerning one contemporary political speech. But Scripture certainly gives us ample reason to recognize the extraordinary phenomenon of words whose implications outrun the intentions of the person speaking them. Perhaps the President intended merely to warn Kenyans against some incompetent, visionless, thieving political alternative. Fair enough. But once those words left his mouth, they entered the Kenyan public square, where every citizen became entitled to apply them to every person seeking political power, including the gentleman who uttered them. Suddenly the speech becomes magnificently democratic, because if choosing a thief should logically produce theft, choosing incompetence should logically produce incompetence, and choosing somebody without vision, plan or agenda should logically produce directionlessness, then there is only one intellectually respectable response: very well, Mr President, let us examine everybody.
Let us examine the opposition, the governors, the MPs, the aspiring presidents, the Cabinet Secretaries, the political coalitions and every other person presenting himself before Kenyans as fit to exercise public power. And since the President himself has so generously supplied the marking scheme, elementary fairness requires that we place his own presidency on the examination table as well. Is there integrity? Is there competence? Is there vision? Is there a credible plan? Is there a coherent agenda? Have promises become measurable results? Have policies improved the ordinary citizen’s condition? The beautiful thing about an examination paper is that the examiner cannot reasonably exempt himself from sitting it merely because he wrote the questions. Indeed, once the questions have been published to the entire class, demanding that everybody except the person who composed them should answer would itself become another magnificent Kenyan comedy.
And this is where the laughter should slowly give way to uncomfortable reflection, because the President’s underlying proposition is fundamentally correct. Political choices have consequences. “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7). Nations, too, eventually eat the harvest of their political planting. The campaign rally becomes the Finance Bill, the slogan becomes taxation, the manifesto becomes public policy, and the political romance eventually becomes an electricity bill, a hospital queue, a university fee, a debt repayment, a business environment and the price of unga. The chicken, the wheelbarrow, the anthem, the convoy, the magnificent roadside declaration and the intoxicating theatre of election season eventually encounter the merciless arithmetic of everyday life. Election day may last several hours, but its consequences can occupy five years, and by the time the music has stopped, the podiums have been dismantled and the campaign vehicles have disappeared from the roads, the citizen is left living inside the practical meaning of the choice he made at the ballot box.
There is therefore a delicious justice in allowing the President’s words to stand exactly as spoken. Perhaps our response should be almost Pilate-like: what has been said has been said. Preserve the clip. Archive it carefully. Replay it when political memories begin their customary election-season deterioration. For President Ruto has supplied an extraordinarily simple examination paper for political leadership: Is this person honest? Is this person competent? Does this person possess vision? Is there a credible plan? Is there a coherent agenda? What has this person actually delivered? Those questions belong to no political party and require neither slogans nor tribal arithmetic. They require evidence. And that is precisely why the speech may prove more useful to Kenyans than its speaker intended, because the criteria do not cease to operate when they reach the gates of State House.
Indeed, suppose President Ruto’s severest critics are completely mistaken about him. Then applying his test rigorously to his own presidency should vindicate him magnificently. Let the evidence speak. But suppose those critics are substantially correct. Then the clip becomes something altogether extraordinary: William Ruto warning Kenyans, in William Ruto’s own voice, against precisely the characteristics they believe they see in William Ruto. The witness begins conducting his own cross-examination, the accused unexpectedly reads aloud the charge sheet, the doctor announces the symptoms while occupying the patient’s chair, and the content creator switches on the camera intending to discuss somebody else, only to discover several sentences into the recording that the device appears to have activated mirror mode. At that point one hardly needs an opposition spokesman, a political analyst or even a satirist. One merely needs a functioning loudspeaker and the replay button.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson hidden beneath all this magnificent Kenyan comedy. Human beings can choose their words, but they cannot always control where those words eventually land; they can select their intended audience, but they cannot dictate every application the audience will make; they can point a finger outward, but they cannot abolish the reflective properties of glass. Sometimes a sentence launched as an arrow against another person travels through the public square, completes an astonishing arc and returns quietly to stand before the archer. Sometimes, like that basketball in the hands of an extraordinary dribbler, the word is bounced upon the hapless defender, sent between the legs of political rhetoric, whipped behind the back of partisan intention, ricocheted off the public and returned with devastating precision towards the hand from which it departed. The speaker may command the initial throw, but he cannot always command the rebound.
Scripture has seen stranger things. Pilate wrote more than Pilate understood; Caiaphas spoke more than Caiaphas intended; Balaam could not see what his donkey could see. The governor had the authority but did not comprehend the full proclamation of his inscription; the high priest had the political calculation but did not comprehend the prophecy embedded within it; the prophet had the title but could not see what the animal beneath him plainly saw. And perhaps that is the enduring danger of speaking truth about leadership before an entire nation: once the words have left your mouth, you cannot dictate which direction the mirror will face, upon whom the ball will bounce, or into whose hands it will eventually return.
The President may indeed have been describing somebody else, and he may have meant every word exactly as he intended it. We should grant him that possibility. But Kenya heard the description, Kenya heard the criteria, and Kenya now possesses the examination paper. The words cannot be recalled merely because citizens discover that they fit applications beyond the one their author intended. Pilate could say, “What I have written, I have written.” In our case, perhaps the modern equivalent is simply: what has been said has been said. The clip exists. The words are his. The criteria are his. And when the time comes to assess those seeking stewardship of this republic, those words are entitled to return to their author and ask, with exquisite democratic simplicity: Mr President, how does the candidate William Ruto perform against the standard pronounced by President William Ruto?
And there, perhaps, the comedy finally becomes complete. The President may have been pointing across the political landscape when he spoke, while the audience saw something rather closer to home. Pilate wrote without comprehending the full proclamation his inscription would carry; Caiaphas spoke without comprehending the redemptive meaning hidden inside his political calculation; Balaam travelled down a road whose danger his own donkey could see more clearly than he could; and now, in our own little corner of history, a President has delivered an eloquent warning about the kind of leadership a serious people ought never knowingly to choose. Perhaps he was speaking entirely about somebody else. Perhaps he was merely giving Kenyans excellent political advice. Either way, the advice has escaped its original destination and now belongs to the republic. The basketball has bounced off the bewildered defender and returned towards the dribbler; the words have completed their circuit; the examination paper has reached the examiner; and the mirror is still standing exactly where it was when the speech began. For once words enter the public square, even their author cannot command the mirror to look elsewhere. The mirror does not vote, it does not campaign, it does not join coalitions, it does not attend rallies, it neither hates nor loves William Ruto, and it has absolutely no candidate in the next election. It performs one ancient, stubborn and wonderfully inconvenient function: it reflects whatever is standing before it.