President Uhuru Kenyatta (C) his deputy William Ruto (L) and Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga during the launch of Building Bridges Initiative report at Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi on November 27, 2019. [Stafford Ondego]Recently the concept deep state has sauntered into our political lexicon with razzmatazz. To hear Deputy President William Ruto and his supporters frequent invocations of the deep state, you get the spooky feeling that there is a secret army of malcontents lurking deep within the bowels of government whose goal is to vehemently curtail his presidential ambitions.On the other hand, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his coterie are accusing Ruto of splitting hairs to find an excuse to reject the outcome of the 2022 presidential elections. They add that as DP he is, in fact, the embodiment of the deep state. Is Ruto chasing his own tail?The term deep state, derived from Turkishderin devlet, refers to a type of governance made up of networks of power operating independent of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.It arose in the 1990s as a way of describing a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy. Potential sources for deep state organisation include organs of state such as armed forces or public authorities (intelligence agencies, police, administrative agencies and government bureaucracy). In popular usage, the term carries an overwhelmingly negative context, although this does not reflect its scholarly understanding.

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Origins and anatomy of the deep state - The Standard