A president who calls his own people animals has confused a pulpit with a throne.
William Ruto stood in a church in Uasin Gishu County on August 2 and told the congregation that a person without religion is no different from an animal. He said human beings are incomplete without believing in God. He said religion gives people direction. Then he reminded everyone that he has been busy building churches, mosques, and madrasas across Kenya because Christians and Muslims alike believe in God
This is not faith. This is a transaction.
Ruto has turned the Kenyan presidency into a fundraising circuit. He appears at church after church, harambee after harambee, dropping millions of shillings into offering baskets while cameras roll. He has pushed tax exemptions for churches and religious organizations. He has made the Kenyan state a partner in building houses of worship while public hospitals run out of medicine and public universities starve for funding. The message is clear. Godliness, in Ruto’s Kenya, is measured by how close you are to the president’s wallet and how willing you are to accept his definition of who counts as human.
Calling those who hold no religious faith animals is not theology. It is dehumanization dressed in scripture. It is the language of men who believe their authority comes from heaven instead of from the ballot. A president who looks at his own citizens, at the farmers in Turkana, the students in Nairobi, the traders in Mombasa, and declares them beasts because they do not pray the way he prays, has already decided that citizenship comes with a religious test. That is not democracy. That is theocracy with a campaign budget.
The irony is thick enough to choke on. Ruto says religion gives people direction. But under his government, Kenyans have been given inflation, debt, and a healthcare system that collapsed under the weight of his own finance act. He says he builds churches because he believes in God. But God does not need a politician to build walls. The hungry need food. The jobless need work. The sick need doctors who show up. Ruto builds churches with public spectacle and private funds whose origins are never explained, while the people in the pews go home to blackouts and empty cupboards.
This is not an attack on faith. Millions of Kenyans, Christian and Muslim, practice their religion with sincerity and humility. They do not need a president to validate their belief, and they certainly do not need a president to tell them who is human and who is animal. Ruto is not defending religion. He is weaponizing it. He is using the language of the divine to shield himself from the language of accountability. When the streets fill with young Kenyans demanding jobs and dignity, he calls them directionless. When they reject his finance bills, he implies they lack God. When they organize on social media instead of in his chosen pews, he questions their humanity.
The colonial missionaries came to Africa with Bibles and called the ancestors savages. Ruto carries a Bible and calls his own citizens animals. The tool is African. The logic is the same. Dehumanize those who do not submit, elevate those who do, and call the whole arrangement divine will
Kenya is a secular republic. Its constitution does not require belief in God to hold citizenship, to vote, to speak, or to demand better from the government. Ruto swore an oath to defend that constitution, not to rewrite it from the pulpit. A president who cannot respect the conscience of every Kenyan, believer or not, has broken that oath already. He does not need another church service. He needs a civics lesson.
And he needs to learn the difference between a shepherd and a wolf.
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