RUTO IN FT

Minister denies blocking Kenya progress

By Barney Jopson in Nairobi

Published: March 9 2010 19:55 | Last updated: March 9 2010 19:55

William Ruto greets his visitors with a customary Kenyan “welcome”, but he is not always pleased to see them. “Why do you want to interview me?” he asks the Financial Times.

Because you are a central player in Kenyan politics, he is told. “That’s not true,” replies the senior cabinet minister. “I’m a player, but not a central one.”




William Ruto: the ambitious politician has fallen out with the premier

Others disagree. Kenya’s coalition government is riven by infighting and corruption and, wherever there has been conflict, Mr Ruto, the agriculture minister, has not seemed far away.

“I stopped talking to foreign journalists because they waste a lot of my time,” he says. “I don’t want to be Kofi Annan or somebody, to want to look for international profile. I know that looks myopic, but I think I’d better spend most of my time trying to deliver on this job.”

Whether he likes it or not, however, an international profile is what Mr Ruto has got. Kenya matters to the outside world. It is the economic hub of east Africa, a base for the United Nations and numerous aid agencies, and a pillar of relative stability in a volatile region that includes neighbouring Somalia. As an aspiring presidential candidate, Mr Ruto has a big influence over whether Kenya will achieve lasting political stability or suffer more ethnic unrest.

Renowned as hard working and ambitious, Mr Ruto helped negotiate the birth of the coalition government that ended the bloodshed triggered by an election in December 2007 that his party, the Orange Democratic Movement, said had been stolen.

But Mr Ruto’s critics have labelled him the most destructive force within that coalition. He has fallen out with Raila Odinga, the prime minister and an erstwhile ODM ally. He has been indirectly implicated in a corruption scandal that almost got him sacked and he is dogged by speculation over an International Criminal Court investigation into the post-election violence.

Mr Ruto, 43, denies any wrongdoing. He lists his achievements as agriculture minister: providing more services to farmers; improving the availability of seeds, fertiliser and credit; and expanding the area of irrigated land.

But Mr Ruto concedes: “We have not managed the grand coalition well. There’s been a lot of discordant voices and it has not helped matters.”

Once, the discord was between the coalition’s two parties, Mr Odinga’s ODM and the Party of National Unity led by Mwai Kibaki, the president. In the past year, however, the confrontation between Mr Ruto and Mr Odinga has come to the fore. Commentators link this to Mr Ruto’s presidential ambitions, which he will not discuss.

Analysts say he is calculating which alliances would give him the best shot at the presidency at the next election in 2012 – and he would have no qualms about ditching Mr Odinga. Relations between the two men reached a nadir last month when Mr Odinga sacked Mr Ruto, only to be overruled by President Kibaki. The cause of the furore: corruption.

Mixed progress on reforms

When Kenya’s coalition government took office in 2008 it promised the following reforms:
Mixed progress on reforms

When Kenya’s coalition government took office in 2008 it promised the following reforms:

●Tackle the distribution of land to reverse previous land grabs aided by the Kenyan elite. Progress: stalled.
●Draw up a new constitution. Progress: advanced, with a new draft almost completed.
●Clean up the police force to end impunity for abuses, including extra-judicial killings. Progress: recommendations drawn up, but little action.
●Strengthen the independence of the judiciary. Progress: minimal.
●Job creation for unemployed youths by building roads and fostering industry. Progress: grand plans, but few results.
●Resettlement of people displaced by the violence that followed the December 2007 election. Progress: more than half have returned home, but thousands remain in
camps.

Mr Ruto’s name had appeared in a report by PwC, the accountancy firm, into a subsidy scheme for maize that became a KSh2bn ($26m, €19m, £17m) corruption racket.

Mr Ruto says there were no direct allegations against him and he cannot be expected to “answer for” the actions of civil servants who were accused. He also points out that the scheme was overseen by a committee from several ministries.

“It is therefore the height of dishonesty to try and pin the whole maize saga on me when the prime minister himself was the chair of the ad hoc committee.”

Commentators say another issue is making Mr Ruto defensive: the ICC. Its prosecutor is waiting for judges’ approval to open a formal investigation into the senior figures allegedly behind Kenya’s post-election violence.

Mr Ruto says: “That doesn’t worry me one bit because my conscience is clear. . . Every activity that is alleged to have been done in terms of planning of violence or financing of violence or whatever it is, those are issues that I never participated in in any way . . .  A fair process will prove the facts.”

He described a report from a Kenyan human rights commission that linked him to the violence as a “heap of lies”. Accusations that he used language that fans tribalism were “bullshit”.

As he shepherds his guests out, Mr Ruto adds reflectively: “I always get in trouble for speaking my mind, but that is a price I’m willing to pay.”

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