The scorn in a tired overused shoe thrown at the President

The shoeing of President William Ruto in Migori last Tuesday was an invite to soul searching within the presidency and beyond. What would drive a citizen to hurl a rude object at the holder of the highest office in the land? What wider lesson does this obtuse action bring home? Beyond that, what does this happening tell about the President’s security? 

Shoeing is as ancient as is humanity and footwear. Hurling of footgear has signified scorn, anger and conquest. Either the person is expressing utter contempt at the object of attack, or he is declaring victory over it. Sometimes it is both.

In Biblical context, a shoe flinging message is found in Psalm 60:8, and Psalm 108:9.  The God of the Israelite nation casts a shoe over a people called the Edomites, descendants of Esau, whom we read of in The Old Testament. Psalm 60:8 reads, “Over Edom I toss my sandal; over Philistia I shout my triumph.”

Matthew Henry Complete Bible Commentary interprets this text as follows: “Edom shall be made a dunghill to throw old shoes upon; at least (King) David shall take possession of it as his own, which was signified by throwing of his shoe over it.”

The traditional English dunghill is a garbage site. The contents are essentially dung, or refuse. The first pellet of this fresh manure finds its place on the ground. Others follow gradually. For, it is the designated refuse site.

In the fullness of time, it becomes a hill of dung; simply a dunghill. It is not known for anything else. Whatever its past glory may be, it is strictly memorialized as an open defecation site.

• .

  Keep Reading

• 
  Ruto's midterm scorecard: Progress vs misconceptions
• 
  Economic reality doesn't align with narrative touted by Kenya Kwanza
• 
  Dribbling Raila dishes out hope amid growing discord in ODM
• 
  Could President Ruto be regretting getting DP Gachagua impeached?

The character of the shoe tells the whole story.

First, the state of the shoe defines the person throwing it, and who is probably the owner. The crude object that landed on President Ruto’s left forearm had the look of a dusty piece of work. Dry filth blew off it, clearly suggestive of the troubled places it had toured in earlier times. It spoke of mud that had eventually dried on the object. The dry mud would break and waft into the air as dust, when it came into contact with another object, at a certain velocity. It was a tired, overused shoe. It had possibly retired many times, through a series of users. And its final use was to insult Kenya’s president as he went about his public tour of duty.

It was the highest show of disgust and disrespect. Kenyans have been torn between the two emotions. They have been disgusted that their president was smacked  with a dirty shoe, whatever his blemishes may be, real or imagined. Others who shared in the disrespect took to social media, with caricatures of the President and the shoe.  These parodies were, in point of fact, extensions of the insolence. The cartoons moved from one social membership group on WhatsApp to another. They suffocated the X platform, and Instagram. These Kenyans have had a ball, at the expense of their leader.

Yet, this is not a laughing matter. Incidents of this kind have often ended up disastrously. The world remembers 1989 as the year of anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe. One of the more tragic occurrences was in Bucharest, Romania. President Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–1989) was addressing a crowd on public disaffection with his government. Some people in the mob began belting out “Ruto Must Go” kind of chants. His efforts to calm them down, to listen to his  narratives on the successes and achievements of his government failed terribly.

Soon, someone threw an object at him. Others followed. And more. The Romanian president took off, running. The first lady, Elena Ceausescu, followed, running in high heels and all. The mobs followed them. The rest is remembered as the tragic history of the shameful, sad and brutal end of a dictatorial dynasty. People of goodwill find it difficult to reconcile with the happenings of 21 to 25 December 1989 in Romania. Yet, these happenings teach us that a thing so simple as the flinging of a shoe at a leader at a public gathering is a grave matter. It can easily fly out of control and end up in untold havoc.

The Kenya government has responded to the  Ruto shoeing by trying to downplay it. The communications team spined the yarn of a Ruto fan, who imagined himself using the old shoe as a mock camera. With this, he fancied himself a videographer, capturing the President’s address to the gathering. Then someone whose view of the President the shoe was blocking hit the offending object. It flew into space and almost landed on the President. Such is a cock and bull story, if ever there was one, a perfect poor tall tale.

Regardless, State House spoke of the possibility of rewarding the shoe man with a modern smartphone. He is expected to use the smart gift to record events of the kind that his shoe could only imagine itself capturing. In truth, however, shoe-flinging is insolent. As the dirty shoe should decay on the dunghill, the thrower is telling the President that he is a dunghill. He is sending the message that you are talking trash. You should just shut up and go to the place where waste goes.

In his expression of frustration and anger, the man who threw the shoe will have been aware that he was taking a massive risk. He will possibly know of the presence of the Presidential security team. This very well trained personnel will usually be spread throughout the crowd, incognito. Yet, he will still go on to aim and throw. The shoe landed accurately on the target. In December 2008, in Baghdad, Iraq, President George W Bush dodged a shoe that a journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, flung at him at a press conference. Arab interpretations had it that this was at once a sign of anger and protest against America’s presence in the Gulf.

Al-Zaid punctuated his shoeing of President Bush with the words;

 “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!”

He must have known that he would not get away with this scot-free. He served nine months in jail.

In like vein, the Ruto shoeman must have known the risks. Like Al-Zaid, the action speaks of a frustrated man, who is ready for anything. He is not afraid of arrest. Or even death. He is a frustrated, hungry and angry Kenyan. People who would engage in this kind of dastardly recklessness consider themselves as having nothing to lose. State House will probably be asking itself why Kenyans are so angry. For, anger against political leadership is pulsating.

When news broke that Kasipul MP Charles Ong’ondo Were had just been shot dead in traffic, social media went on fire with celebration. National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula has dismissed Kenyans’ ventilation in social media as “nonsense and trash.” Condoling with the late Were’s family, the Speaker lamented, “Kenyans have become very callous; Kenyans have become very heartless; Kenyans have become people who(m) it is difficult to describe!”

Wetang’ula advised the Were family not to “pay any attention to the filth and nonsense on social media.”

And yet, is this part of the problem? Is Kenya’s political elite fomenting frustration and anger in the youth by being deaf to their concerns? Does this leadership ignore as “filth and nonsense” what young Kenyans post in social media? What do these Kenyans post in these spaces? They don’t just engage in entertainment and fellowship with family and friends. They do politics. They speak the truth to power. But does power listen? 

A digital report in 2024 ranked Kenyans among the highest users of social media in the world. Social media is the latter-day town crier, globally, and certainly in Kenya. Leaders who characterize popular unrest on these platforms as “trash and nonsense” do so at their own risk and peril.

In the case of the Were passing, social media parodied Mandera North MP Bashir Abdullahi, who dismissed killings of Gen–Z protesters as something the country should leave behind. “People are killed all the time. We sympathize and move on,” Now this is a reification of heartless callousness. Kenyan youth have basically repaid Members of Parliament in their own coins. They “sympathized” with the Were family, and “moved on.”

But, without a doubt, President Ruto is the most caricatured leader in social media in Kenya; perhaps in Africa. Almost as if they work in shifts, Kenyans pass the “Kasongo baton” to each other, round the clock. They lampoon, badger, cajole, mock, and scream angrily at the President. At the advent of the Ruto–Raila Odinga  broad–based government, youthful Kenyans inundated social media with effigies of the President. It was difficult for officialdom to hide its shock and anger. Suspects were abducted and disappeared. The whereabouts of many remain unknown.

Responding to unremitting public calls to end the abductions and attendant killings, President Ruto promised, at a public event, that they would end. On January 3, the Speaker of the Senate Amason Kingi told Kenyans, “You, as a parent, teach your child. When the world deals with your child, do not be the first person to begin screaming!”

Kenyan leaders may need to reconsider the attitude that the country’s youth are a “trash and nonsense” spewing nuisance, to be ignored. That Kenya has a major youth challenge that requires careful midwifing is hardly a matter of doubt. It is possible to sum up the biggest relational problem in Kenya as the intersection between frustrated youth and an uncaring political leadership. If the political leadership is not uncaring, then it is clueless at best. Why?

The Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) indicates on its website that Kenya has an average unemployment rate of 12.75 per cent. Yet, youth unemployment (for ages 15–34 years) is at the rate of 67 per cent. And it only keeps growing. Over one million people enter the labour market every year, yet the capacity to absorb them is not there! This time bomb is likely to explode someday.

The fact that politicians will rove around the country on a busy working day knowing very well that there will be massive youthful populations to address is itself a problem. Elsewhere, such youth will spend this prime time in gainful employment, and not at rallies listening to politicians insulting their competitors, and giving promises that they don’t fulfil. Many of these youth boast of a good education; quite a good number with university degrees that do not signify much on an overpopulated job market. Those lucky to get jobs are underpaid. They also lack job security. They are in a poor paying job today, and in the high street tomorrow. They are, accordingly, unable to fly the nest, to start living on their own, unless they pool efforts with friends.

In a word, Kenya is a boiling pot of youthful frustration and anger. People who emerge out of learning institutions believing that they are about to conquer the world find themselves, instead, on their knees. It would seem that such youth are ready to take their anger to just about anybody who comes their way.

Mercifully, a lot of this energy is spewed in social media. But the day comes when they meet  face to face with their foremost social media object of disgust.

But away from the frustrations and anger is the question of State security. How safe is the President and the State?

It should worry his handlers that the very first known object to be thrown at him landed squarely on target. There was nobody to bite the bullet, or in this case to bite the shoe, for President Ruto.

This is worrying.

Maybe, this is the best time for the President to leave the microphone to broadcasters? Could it be the right time for him to climb down from car rooftops, to go back to the office? If he is building roads, will he need to talk about them? What needs to be addressed in Kenya are the issues, it would seem; not the people.

It is true, as Speaker Wetang’ula observes, that Kenyans are becoming very heartless. It has never been in the Kenyan national DNA to celebrate anyone’s death. In tragedy Kenyans have usually been quick to rally to the location, with the sole aim of helping. The emerging DNA of celebrating Chairman Wafula Chebukati’s death, and that of MP Beatrice Elachi’s son, and now that of Ong’ondo Were; all these, together with the shoeing of the President; are all unprecedented.

Kenya today speaks to a frustrated and angry youth. They don’t think that they have anything to lose by engaging in deviant behaviour. The need for soul searching at the very top speaks for itself. True national dialogue that is not driven by sharp appetite to remain in power in 2027, addressing the job and salary situation; a genuine war against theft and corruption; and less talk, less government in people’s lives; less politicking by State House; these could lead to less frustration, less anger; and less shoeing. 

-Dr Muluka is a communications adviser and secretary general of DNA party