The Kenyan government has described as “shameful” an incident in which a shoe was thrown at President William Ruto during a rally on Sunday.
Widely shared video clips show the footwear striking the president’s left arm as he held it aloft while he was speaking.
Government spokesman Isaac Mwaura condemned what happened and called for those behind it to be “apprehended”. “What would happen if we all decided to throw shoes at each other? What values are we teaching our children?” he asked in post on X calling for the institution of the presidency to be respected.
Kenyan media are reporting that three people have been arrested, but the police have not confirmed this.
Some MPs have also criticised the shoe-throwing, which has been described as a major security lapse.
Dennis Itumbi, a senior official in the president’s office, has described the incident as a “moment that got out of hand” suggesting that it happened by accident.
On Facebook, he shared a video taken from a different angle, which he said showed a person lifting a shoe “in jest, pretending to be a camera” and another person slapping it away, “annoyed that the ‘shoe-cam’ blocked his view”.
“Unfortunately, it flew forward… straight toward the president,” he said.
The president was addressing a crowd at a public event in the western county of Migori as part of a three-day tour of the region where he has been launching and commissioning development projects.
While the views of some ordinary Kenyans chime with the feeling that the shoe-throwing was disrespectful, others have suggested that it reflected frustrations over the state of the economy.
An official video of the event shared by the president on X does not show the shoe incident, which appears to have happened off-camera.
However, commotion within the crowd is briefly seen. The president is heard asking his security officers, who may have been about to look for the culprit, to leave the people in the audience alone.
The screen then goes blank before and minutes later the video shows other people speaking at the rally.
The shoe-throwing comes amid growing concerns over the safety of public officials. Last week, an opposition MP was shot dead in the capital, Nairobi, by gunmen on a motorcycle in a suspected assassination.
Nelson Koech, an MP in the president’s party, said Sunday’s incident was an “affront to our democracy” adding that “we have taken a joke too far”.
“You can imagine if that shoe was a bullet… people joke about the security of the president. It took a very bold step for someone to take their shoe and throw it at the president.
“We must secure the head of state,” he told local station Citizen TV.
Migori is in a region considered to be a stronghold of veteran opposition politician Raila Odinga, who ran against Ruto in the 2022 presidential election, but who has since made a deal with the president.
The agreement signed in March between Odinga and Ruto was “to help ease the prevailing tension in the country”, following deadly anti-tax demonstrations last year.
Since he became president in 2022, Ruto has faced protests from Kenyans frustrated with the cost of living and increased taxes.