Class, power, and resentment: unpacking elite panic and hostility towards Ruto

In the current commentary surrounding President William Ruto’s Administration, a persistent theme has emerged among certain Kenyan elites: a visceral disdain that feels more personal than political.

While opposition to a sitting president in Kenya is neither new nor unusual, the intensity and tone of the criticism directed at President Ruto, especially from sections of the political and economic elite, demand a deeper examination. Is it purely ideological? Or is it something far more insidious reflecting Kenya’s unresolved class tensions?

What we're witnessing is not just political disagreement, but seems to be classist resentment. Much of the elite anger toward President Ruto is rooted not in policy disputes or governance failures, but in the discomfort that accompanies a perceived usurpation of elite privilege by someone from “outside the club.”

President Ruto’s administration is well into the halfway mark and his leadership style is not above critique; in-fact democracy demands his policies, leadership style and governance record be rigorously scrutinised; however, when the critique especially from the privileged elite becomes saturated with class prejudice; focusing more on who he is than what he does, it serves to reveal an entrenched discomfort with the shifting balance of power.

William Ruto’s biography is by now well-known; born in a humble family in the Rift Valley, he rose through the ranks of Kenya’s politics without the typical elite lineage or institutional support that characterised some of his predecessors’ ascendancy to the presidency. He was neither from a political dynasty nor a powerful business family and his story of hustle, grit and strategic manoeuvring was enough to unsettle Kenya’s traditional ruling elite in a context where political and social progress are determined by elite patronage and lineage.

Ruto represented a rupture, and his rise was interpreted not just as political competition but as a social affront, challenging the entrenched belief that leadership is the preserve of a particular class of people.

Within these classes, exemplified by an elite concentrated in one region that had governed Kenya over the past two decades, it was quite discernible that the opposition was to his presidency, and it was disguised in the language of governance.

Whenever those opposed to him called him incompetent, unworthy, and un-presidential, it was subtly coded language focused on his person rather than the substance of his policies, clear markers of the deep-seated class distinctions in the political landscape.

Despite the progressive nature of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution, the country remains a deeply unequal society, where access to economic opportunity and social progress is still tied to one’s class, geography and political patronage.

 It is no wonder that the region which had held the presidency for a collective 34 years had the highest number of millionaires in the country and Ruto’s ascendency became a mirror reflecting these societal inequities.

 His “bottom up” campaign became deeply unsettling to the privileged elite who had benefited through the years but the irony was that Ruto, in many ways had embraced the language and tools of elite politics even as he claimed to upend them, nonetheless for the elite, the offense seemed to lie not in how he governed, but that he governed at all.

The distinct tone of “opposition” against president Ruto from the previously governing elite and now being used to incite the masses from the region is a familiar disdain if we go back in history.

 It is something we have seen before; Former President Moi and Prime Minister Raila Odinga faced it from the same group: a visceral, often mocking and deeply personal resentment.

In the late 1970s when Vice President Daniel Arap Moi ascended to the presidency, he faced similar contempt from the same elite circles.

Moi was persistently derided and termed as a “passing cloud”, unrefined, or intellectually unworthy. His background, his speech, and even his political style were subjected to mockery and thinly veiled expressions of discomfort with his roots and the communities he represented.

The disdain was not just about governance; it was cultural, class-based, and deeply personal. Kenya’s then political elite, especially those around Mount Kenya and Nairobi’s upper circles, recoiled in utter disbelief at his presidency.

In their view, Moi was an uncultured, uneducated “hillbilly” from the Rift Valley who had not been educated in the West and lacked the cosmopolitan sophistication expected of a head of state. His modest background, Tugen accent and local schooling were seen as disqualifications to leadershi,p and the resentment never quite went away, even as he entrenched himself in power for 24 years.

The same pattern re-emerged with Raila Odinga, particularly during his tenure as Prime Minister. Despite his  international education and experience, coupled with his stint of service in government, Raila was never fully embraced by the same group.

He was instead subjected to a relentless campaign of ridicule and suspicion, often framed through ethnocentric narratives that suggested his Luo heritage was somehow inferior and incompatible with state leadership.

His cultural identity, mannerisms, and even his progressive ideas were portrayed as "un-capitalistic" or threatening to a supposed national ethos that was, in fact, a façade for a narrow ethnic-class hegemony.

The election of President Mwai Kibaki in 2002 marked more than just the end of the KANU era it signalled the reassertion of Kenya’s political aristocracy, particularly from Kibaki’s region, with a renewed vigour and confidence.

What followed between 2002 and 2022 became not merely democratic consolidation but elite consolidation, it was a period which saw the scions of Kenya’s founding families and their close associates many of whom had studied abroad financed by state largesse or old patronage networks return to take up prime positions in government, banking, media and civil society.

Under President Kibaki, the promise of a new, inclusive Kenya was quickly sacrificed at the altar of ethnic patronage. His inner circle unapologetically framed his leadership as a restoration, the return of Kenya to “order,” a euphemism for regional political and economic dominance.

Far from transforming the state, Kibaki's government reinstated the hierarchies that Moi had disrupted. Banking, media, civil service, and parastatals became zones of elite reoccupation, based on connections, heritage, and ethnic loyalty.

This pattern only deepened under President Uhuru Kenyatta. His presidency, though outwardly technocratic and framed as “modernising” was anchored in old money and familiar networks. The so-called “digital government” masked a recycling of power among privileged families.

 What looked like progress in fact entrenched an exclusionary political economy where access, opportunity, and influence were tightly guarded. The state, once again, became a tool for elite reproduction, and national unity a rhetorical device rather than a governing principle.

This is the backdrop against which President Ruto’s presidency must be understood. Like President Moi before him, he is viewed as a man from the political periphery, he did not inherit a legacy name, he studied locally, he wasn’t groomed in foreign capitals or socialised in Nairobi’s gated communities and his “hustler” campaign became a potent message; a literal declaration of social identity, drawing on a class of Kenyans long excluded from power except as voters and spectators kept on the periphery.

 His entry into the statehouse brought about a new group; a new social class, the kind the Nairobi elite had long dismissed as the “backwards upcountry people.”

The disdain experienced by Moi almost three decades before returned. You could hear it in these elite circles, in sponsored digital media chatter and in discussions questioning his person.

The elite belittled his leadership, the people he elevated and the world he now represented. It was Moi déjà vu. But this time it was more brutal, the backlash was extreme, because Ruto had fought his way in, he had defeated the alliance of the Kenyattas and Odinga’s, a coalition that had symbolised the post-independence social order.

The 2022 election was not just a win for President Ruto, it represented a cultural and class upheaval.

The election that saw him ascend to power disrupted a decades-old hierarchy that had long concentrated power in the hands of the country’s political aristocracy from the Mt. Kenya region.

To millions of Kenyans, he symbolised a defiance of entrenched privilege, a shift from the elite entitlement of the past twenty years, a presidency by someone challenging the belief that only those born into power were destined to lead and enjoy the good of the land. This realignment unsettled Kenya’s old guard, especially the Kibaki and Uhuru “home crowd” elite; not just because of policy, but because it upended their long-standing grip on who got to define the nation’s future.

President Ruto’s deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, was a deeply polarising figure who appeared to view his primary role as defending Mt. Kenya elites and their interests against efforts to make the state more inclusive and equitable.

While initially embraced within President Ruto’s administration as a symbol of regional balance, Rigathi Gachagua quickly gravitated toward a different mandate one rooted not in national transformation but in regional preservation.

He entered into an implicit political bargain with the entrenched elite of the Mt. Kenya region, positioning himself as a gatekeeper of their long-standing economic and political interests.

In a government quickly shifting from the poetry of campaign to the prose of governing by pivoting towards a more inclusive model of governance, Gachagua became the counterweight: the custodian of status quo arrangements that privileged Mt. Kenya’s historical dominance in land, capital, and influence.

He was not originally part of the region’s refined political aristocracy, but he was swiftly adopted as their gladiator. His combative, ethnocentric patronage based political style was seen as crude by some within those elite circles but he served their purposes: a political warrior willing to fight fiercely in defence of the old order.

Coupled with his personal appetite for wealth and influence, which reportedly intensified during the tenure of his late brother, Nyeri Governor Nderitu Gachagua, the Mt. Kenya oligarchy had found not a peer, but a proxy a man willing to vocalise their discomfort with Ruto’s seeming redistributive agenda, in language that would serve this elite’s preservation.

An example of Gachagua’s “man in the arena moment” representing this group would eventually be seen in the elite resistance to the president’s Affordable Housing Policy. The resistance at its core was anchored in what the policy represented; a re-ordering of the economic hierarchies which had long been dominated by rent-seeking landlordism in the urban areas of Kenya.

 In Nairobi the capital, the housing sector had been characterised by an informal rental economy in which a small elite class owned and controlled vast swathes of land and rental property. Over 61% of the population in the city lived in these informal settlements and paid disproportionately high rents.

The Affordable Housing Policy was going to disrupt this model by directly investing in mass housing for low and middle income earners and the backlash from segments of the elite who found a mouth piece in Gachagua were not just about critiquing the fiscal design of the policy but articulating class anxiety; it was an expression of discomfort by those who saw mass housing as threat to an old order in which they had continued to profit.

This resultant conflict was not about housing policy in the narrow sense, it was about power and control. As the scholar Naomi Mburu notes, “The housing question in Kenya has always been a proxy for wider questions of access, dignity, and economic security,” the tensions were regional and historical.

Post-independence urban planning, especially in Nairobi, favoured landowners from specific regions, who capitalised on early land allocations and state-financed acquisition models. The Affordable Housing Programme, which aimed to empower the working classes and slum dwellers, would upend and reconfigure this regional and economic balance.

As Ruto moved to reconfigure the architecture of power and challenged the regional monopolies over the state, built over the past twenty years, the elite backlash intensified, and what followed became a contest not merely about loyalty or leadership style, but about a fundamental clash between two visions of power.

Meanwhile, Gachagua conformed to a predictable mould; similar to what Moi had faced in the early 1980’s during the formative years of his presidency, when the then Mt Kenya elite had attempted to undermine Moi’s leadership, fearing the erosion of their privileged position.

When Gachagua was removed by impeachment from office, the Mt. Kenya elite, feeling politically cornered, responded by regrouping, recruiting and financing politicians to destabilise Ruto’s administration and limit him to a single term presidency and restoring the era when they dominated decision-making and enjoyed privilege. Increasingly led by Gachagua and Uhuru Kenyatta’s acolytes, they cloaked their resistance in the language of political survival, unity and regional pride.

The months that followed took on a familiar historical pattern, echoing past fallouts such as those between Kenyatta and Jaramogi, and later Kibaki and Raila, namely the recurring struggle between those trying to broaden the Kenyan state and those determined to keep it in the hands of a few.

President Ruto is certainly not above criticism, there is plenty to debate about his economic, social, and governance record.

Many of the challenges his government faces are self-inflicted including his failure to rein in corruption networks and the tone-deaf displays of wealth by the newbies to riches who flaunt luxury homes and cars before a struggling public; but however imperfect his administration has been, he has embodied a genuine attempt to democratise access to state power, to bring those previously “unseen” and marginalised communities to the centre of decision making.

The fierce backlash this has provoked is itself a revealing indicator of how deeply rooted and resistant to change the culture of exclusion and elite dominance is.

The recent public outbursts by the “recruited” politicians bidding the interests of the previously governing class and elite led by their new leader Gachagua has moved from policy critiques to aesthetic disdain on the person of the president, mocking his mannerisms, his religious beliefs, his physical appearance and perhaps it is time to call it what it is; the real issue is that a man from Sugoi now sits at the centre of a system built by and for the privileged.

The dismissal of his leadership as incompetent echoes sentiments being held by the Mt. Kenya elite, and the manufactured outrage, if analysed objectively, leads one to ask: where was this extreme outrage during the Uhuru years with its governance missteps?

The selective outbursts and deliberate erasure of the memory of the past twenty years that also saw a significant mismanagement of various sectors, reinforces the sense that the real grievance isn’t about Ruto’s governance, but his genealogy; for the previously privileged elite, the wrong kind of Kenyan is occupying the highest office in the land.

What we are now witnessing is not unique to Kenya. There are examples around us of what happens whenever entrenched privilege is disrupted.

Across the Northern border in Ethiopia, for nearly three decades, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated political, economic and military power. When that dominance was eroded under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the response by the elite classes from the region was not introspection, but insurrection. The resistance to relinquishing the disproportionate privilege fuelled one of Africa’s most devastating civil conflicts in recent times.

This example presents a lesson all too clear for Kenyans to see; when those used to power find themselves displaced by broader democratic currents, their backlash often comes cloaked in moral outrage but driven by a loss of status. If this is unchecked, this elite backlash can destabilise far more than egos, it can shake and break nations.

This is a necessary conversation that needs to be had in Kenya. It goes beyond the Ruto presidency; Kenyans must interrogate the unspoken rules about who is “allowed” to lead. If we want a truly inclusive democracy, we must ask the hard questions.

Is our vision of leadership still underpinned by our colonial heritage, where only the polished, connected and well-spoken of a certain pedigree can be deemed as leaders? Can we collectively imagine a country where leadership is accessible regardless of whatever ethnicity and class one comes from?

Class is the last frontier in Kenya’s national reckoning. We have tried to nominally confront ethnicity, gender and youth inclusion, but class remains a subtext we refuse to name, even as it shapes our politics.

If President Ruto’s presidency achieves nothing else, maybe it will force us into an uncomfortable conversation, one that is long overdue, about why some people feel he should never have been allowed to lead. It will make us confront and challenge the unwritten rules of power in Kenya about who is deemed worthy to be a leader.

It is a moment that has exposed the quiet and enduring belief held by some citizens that leadership is a birthright, not a democratic choice, that only certain regions or social classes are fit to occupy the highest office in the land. President Ruto unsettled that narrative, disrupted a generational sense of entitlement and redrew the map of political inclusion.

The resultant elite panic from those who were in power for the past twenty years has evolved to masquerade as political concern, with its choirmaster Rigathi Gachagua leading its chorus.

Whatever one’s view of his presidency, it has revealed an uncomfortable truth: our fledgling democracy is haunted by an elite class anxious over losing control. So, for Kenyans, until we confront that, no matter who holds the office, the promise of a truly inclusive state will remain an illusion and out of reach.