Political cartoons in Kenya have never been without risks. Cartoonists have faced sacking and state-created censorship, lawsuits from angry politicians unhappy with their portrayals, and even the occasional phoned-in threat. However, until this week, they have never had to endure arbitrary detention.
Even during the worst days of Daniel arap Moi’s 24-year dictatorship, the “Nyayo Mistake” that ravaged the country from 1978 to 2002, cartoonists were not directly targeted by the state. Newspaper publishers saw their printing presses trashed, and editors and writers – including satirists such as Wahome Mutahi – were detained for long periods without trial. However, cartoonists were spared the regime’s worst excesses.
That changed with the kidnapping of Gideon Kibet, better known as Kibet Bull, a young cartoonist who has become an internet sensation for his bold use of silhouettes to mock President William Ruto’s administration, which has always taken and more of an authoritarian turn after its legitimization took place. questioned by youth-led street protests across the country.
The regime responded with a brutal crackdown that killed dozens and a campaign of kidnappings of prominent activists that continues to this day. According to Kenya’s National Human Rights Commission, in the past seven months, at least 82 people have been arrested and nearly a third of them remain unaccounted for. Kibet and his brother, Ronnie Kiplagat, disappeared in the capital, Nairobi, on Christmas Eve after meeting opposition lawmaker Okiya Omtatah.
That police are behind the duo’s disappearance is partly confirmed by reports that officers had earlier entered his home in Nakuru, about 150 km (93 miles) from the capital, in a futile attempt to capture him there. The police have also been implicated in previous kidnappings, including the kidnapping of veteran journalist Macharia Gaitho, who was abducted from the area of a police station where he had sought refuge.
By going after Kibet, the Ruto regime has shown its fragility. According to one theory, cartoons depend on the political system. While in totalitarian regimes the artist is forced to praise the system and denounce its enemies, and in democratic ones the cartoonist is a watchman, keeping the rulers honest and accountable, in authoritarian regimes some dissent is allowed, and when regimes become fragile, cartoonists . mercilessly expose their rigid stupidity.
For six decades, Kenya has been an aspiring democracy, where people constantly have to challenge the authoritarian tendencies of their rulers. Ruto, who was elected with almost a third of the vote in 2022, has been particularly insecure about his position, initially trying to carve out a place for himself on the international stage to cover up a lack of domestic legitimacy. The mid-year protests, which forced him to withdraw unpopular tax measures, reshuffle his cabinet and launch a youth movement focused on his ouster, also fueled his authoritarian tendencies, which had been nurtured by none other than Moi himself.
Through his cartoons, Kibet Bull has mercilessly exposed Ruto’s rigid stupidity, attracting the attention and ire of the regime, as well as winning the admiration of millions of Kenyans both online and offline. He now joins dozens of youths who have disappeared from the Ruto regime, some of whom have reported being tortured and others killed. That the kidnappings are the work of state agents is not seriously in doubt and has drawn condemnation from much of Kenyan society as well as human rights groups.
In recent days, Ruto has vowed to end the kidnappings, which many Kenyans have interpreted as an admission of complicity. In his New Year’s message to the nation, he acknowledged “instances of excessive and extrajudicial actions by members of the security services” but appeared to suggest that the real problem was not police behaving badly, but citizens advancing “radical , individualistic and selfish interpretations of rights and freedoms”.
Ruto, who has in the past shown disdain for the teaching of history in Kenyan schools, arguing that Kenyans needed to focus on more “marketable” disciplines, would actually be well served by reading Kenya’s recent past. . Over the past seven decades, Kenya’s rulers – from the British colonialists to his predecessors as president, including the indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, Uhuru Kenyatta – have all learned the same painful lesson: lack of legitimacy is deadly to their regimes and their brutality will not save them.
Ruto is clearly the underdog and he knows it. Barely halfway through his term, he is already planning to change the rules for handing over power to give himself more control over the process, even though the next election is more than two and a half years away. As he despairs, he has had several major government reshuffles and even instituted the impeachment, dismissal, and replacement of his deputy. After successfully running a populist campaign for the presidency against the “dynasties” – the political families that have dominated Kenyan politics since independence – he is reduced to mincing his words and seeking their support.
But it is this same vulnerability, insecurity, fear and desperation that make Ruto so dangerous. It is this that makes him target the young, whose only crime is to seek the better life he promised them. It’s this that makes his regime cringe at ridicule and see online cartoons as an existential threat. And it is this that makes him a threat to the nation and its constitutional order – one that all Kenyans should be alive to.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
