Why Ruto is losing the plot ahead of 2027 elections

Is President William Ruto losing the plot? Hearing the bizarre stuff he’s coming out with lately, and seeing his occasionally faltering performance atop his soapbox vehicle, one has seriously to wonder if all is well ‘upstairs’.

During the past week he has launched new vitriolic attacks on the opposition, and on Uhuru Kenyatta especially, claiming he had performed huge services for Uhuru in the past and bemoaning how Uhuru has now betrayed him.

I wonder when it will dawn on Ruto that accusing someone of betraying him actually increases that person’s standing in the public perception. But who knows, maybe that’s the plan. More on that another time.

Perhaps Ruto’s most out-there idea this past week was that we should start milking buffaloes. This has given rise to some wonderfully funny memes on the internet, but presumably even Ruto does not mean milking the type of buffalo we have in our game parks.

These wild, savannah-dwelling beasts, one of the famous ‘Big Five’, are highly aggressive and have never been domesticated. After hippos, they are reputed to kill more humans than any other animal.

The Indian buffalo, a completely different species, has been domesticated for centuries and lives happily alongside its human owners.

Presumably it is the ongoing milk shortage that has prompted this brainstorm, a shortage that seems to belie the government’s claim that national milk production has increased from 4.5 billion litres to between 5.4 and 5.6 billion litres annually.

After all the lies we’ve been told about the country’s wonderful performance (shades of Donald Trump and the US), one has to ask whether this claim is true, especially as there was reportedly a fall in milk-processor deliveries in two months alone this year, from 84.4 million litres in June to 75 million litres in August.

And it seems that persistent drought and increased animal-feed and health costs have been instrumental, rather than the fact that we are milking cows rather than buffaloes. Buffaloes in any case have a lower milk yield than dairy cows.

Ruto has done nothing to address pertinent issues. He will blame climate change while boastfully hosting climate conferences and then appealing for more foreign dollars to combat such change, but at the same time he launches no serious initiatives that would help absorb the shock inflicted by inclement weather patterns.

One only has to look at the current flooding at the coast and elsewhere to see that there has been total neglect of new infrastructure planning, upgrading or renewal. Every year it’s the same, never any improvement, as if rain always descends as a total surprise. Then there is the decimation of forest areas, the failure to build dams, the diversion and/or pollution of water sources for industry and so on.

Animal feed and dip costs have risen. There are major challenges to cattle health issues. Diseases such as East Coast fever, brucellosis, foot and mouth, Rift Vallley fever and lumpy skin remain threats not only to national food security but also to human health, through animal-to-human transmission.

But Ruto’s bizarre idea is to introduce something as experimental as domestic buffaloes, animals that would be so unacclimatised to our environment that they would probably drop like flies due to lack of immunity, even if the whole wacky idea of suddenly importing and establishing multiple herds of such beasts would be viable. Is he imagining this as a short-term solution to our milk shortage problem? Bonkers.

Rather than resolving baseline feed and livestock health issues and actually dealing with substantive matters affecting dairy farming, Ruto’s solution is reminiscent of his ‘2060’ idea – he has failed to do the jobs detailed in the 2030 plan, so let’s not fix that but instead let’s forget it and do something completely different.

Bill, you can’t close your eyes forever and run away from your failures by replacing them with strange new experiments.

This kooky approach is reminiscent of a few other people and their bizarre suggestions in the past. We’ll ignore Trump and his idea that people should drink bleach to cure Covid, but he was not the first proponent of screwball ideas to do with human consumption.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro was also obsessed with dairy and milk production, and he believed he could create a Cuban super-cow if he cross-bred local Cebu cattle with Canadian Holstein cows, and that this would dramatically boost the country’s milk supply.

He reportedly drank milkshakes all day, and when he heard of a local cow named Ubre Blanca (White Udder) producing record-breaking quantities of milk, he commissioned an air-conditioned pavilion for her comfort.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini believed garlic was the elixir of life, and he would consume raw platefuls at a time. He considered pasta the food of the devil and tried to abolish it. He too apparently imagined that projecting his pseudoscientific health beliefs and rewriting the nation’s food rules would consolidate his hold on national power.

Trump during a White House event suggested junk food might actually be superior to healthy options, claiming he was healthy and energetic on steak and processed items. (We are seeing how that has turned out.)

And then former Bolivian president Evo Morales declared that eating chicken bred for commercial sale turned men homosexual. 

Yep, there are some strange, unhinged folk out there, with any number of eccentric ideas. Should we be worried that Ruto appears in danger of joining their number?