Many presidents, like Ruto, have had a tough first term

President William Ruto addresses residents of Suneka, Kisii County. [PCS]

History offers a generous consolation to unpopular first-term presidents.  Consider the precedents. In 1983, Ronald Reagan's approval rating slumped to 41 per cent, battered by recession and resistance to his agenda. A year later, he won 49 states. Despite the Iran-Contra affair, he left office in 1989 with a 63 per cent approval rating, and a reputation that has only appreciated since.

Bill Clinton's first term was hardly smoother. Stymied by legislative gridlock, scandal, and a historic loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, his presidency was widely written off as overreaching and over. He won re-election in 1996, presided over a roaring labour market and the first balanced budgets in decades, and departed with 66 per cent approval; the highest end-of-term rating since the Second World War.

Closer to home, Mwai Kibaki endured a similar arc. Within two years of his triumphant election in 2002, disillusionment was rife. Newspaper headlines declared that life had become harder under his watch. So diminished was his political capital that his government lost the constitutional referendum of 2005 to an opposition campaign. He reshuffled his cabinet, co-opted leading opposition figures, secured a second term in 2007 and left office in 2013 with approval ratings that subsequent Kenyan presidents have struggled to match.

President William Ruto appears to be treading the same well-worn path. Elected in 2022, he inherited an economy on the brink of sovereign default. His response has been a programme of painful but arguably necessary fiscal retrenchment: new taxes, subsidy cuts and a hard line on debt. It has steadied the sovereign balance sheet but at a considerable cost to household budgets. Unsurprisingly, voters have personalised the pain; Ruto’s approval ratings have sunk to record lows.

An opposition movement has stepped up, styling itself Linda Mwananchi, Kiswahili for “protect the citizen.” Light on policy but heavy on anti-incumbent sentiment, it has presented itself as the antithesis of Ruto-nomics. Its message has found particular resonance among Kenya’s urban youth. The question, as ever, is durability. Outrage is easy to mobilise; an electoral coalition is so much harder to moot and sustain. Can Linda Mwananchi convert a wave of discontent into the machinery required to win a general election next year?

Already, the fault lines are visible. The movement’s luminaries are jostling for position and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna, its most indignant and recognisable face. Sifuna appears to want it both ways. He presents himself as primus inter pares, first among equals, while quietly seeking to retain both the party leadership and presidential ticket. His colleagues are less enamoured with this formulation. They are prepared to countenance him as either candidate or leader but not both; lest too much power be concentrated in one man, to the exclusion of the rest. It is an old Kenyan story: A coalition united by what it opposes, divided by what it covets.

Amid the infighting, voters are noticing that Ruto-nomics may be working. Kenya has dodged the sovereign default trap that ensnared five peers. Projects mocked by Sifuna as “shiny objects” could, in fact, ease daily life. If Linda Mwananchi keeps stalling while Ruto gains ground, his re-election next year looks rather comfortably assured indeed.