Ruto3: Figures don't tally, pledges falter, while opposition stays silent

In a week dominated by what government “spox” amusingly titled the “commemoration of” (or was it “commiseration with”) three years of President William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza, now broad based, regime, the most interesting part was the muted silence of the opposition. We have none. 

Lest we forget, our political elite, to paraphrase Orwell’s Animal Farm, are one and the same animal. There are no differences, distinctions or opposites, only interests. The uniting factor in our vernacular politics of resource distribution, not resource to wealth generation, is “it’s our turn to eat”. Kenya sorely needs political leaders with a “balance sheet” view of development. 

Fortunately, the media that is our fourth estate came to our rescue. Across all media platforms, Kenyans offered their views on this administration, from armchair talk shows to “kwa ground” interviews. To be fair, government apparatchiks were also available to offer “rose-tinted” vocals and vibes while visibly squirming with discomfort in the face of unvarnished public opprobrium. 

We also got an official statement to “commemorate” three years. Luckily, the tired “cheaper unga” story is gone; now it’s seven million digitalised farmers and 21 million bags of distributed fertilizer. Does this mean, over a three-year period, every farmer got one bag of fertilizer?  Here’s another one. How does a Sh4,000 to Sh5,500 sugar price rise translate to 76 per cent growth? 

But it’s more than this. As with the previous Jubilee regime, this current one seems to have its special statistical source divorced from actual government records. The credibility test of this data was best demonstrated by the fact that, in publishing government’s official response to a coruscating recent article on Ruto, The Economist ignored about 90 per cent of the data in that response, probably not just for reasons of editorial space!  Lies, damned lies and statistics, right? 

Let’s do this slowly. We have Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) as a policy agenda. Not quite a strategy or a plan, but we also have its translation into the Fourth Medium-Term Plan under Kenya Vision 2030 (MTP IV - yes, the one with thousands of output and outcome indicators and performance targets).

Built up from sector plans, it drills down to MDA strategic plans, then annual work plans, budgets and performance contracts.  In reality, you will be hard pressed to find actual MDA strategic plans online or offline, yet we somehow endure the annual glitz and gloss of performance contracting. 

If you wanted to test any regime on its governance quality, this vertical logic is where it all begins. This is where Kibaki built state capacity which successor regimes have criminally neglected or wildly sidestepped. As said before, today we have tossed out the planning part of government as we jump straight from policy (capture) to (corrupted) budgets.  And no, e-procurement doesn’t fix this; the fix we need is our overall policy to results cycle, including public finance management. 

If there is any lesson we must take from the East – from China to Japan to Singapore – it is that state capacity, including strong institutions, must develop alongside private sector, and markets.  This is a story for another day.  Let’s just say “l’état, c’est moi” (the state is me) is old, not gold. 

Put differently, would we need empowerment events and State House succour if stuff worked?  Which brings us back to Ruto@3. The flip side of planning, after implementation, is reporting. The good news is, contrary to my assertion last week, monitoring and evaluation is alive in Kenya. So we don’t need pressers to track progress, we have a system that actually does this for us. 

The latest output from this system – the National Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation System (NIMES) – is a draft Annual Progress Report (APR) for 2024/25 on MTP IV implementation.  This is the report that tracks those thousands of output and outcome targets mentioned earlier. 

Let’s help government by comparing what NIMES says on BETA with what government “spox” tells us. On the six BETA objectives (cost of living, hunger, jobs, tax base, forex reserves, inclusive growth), real gains are reported, but only the first objective – inflation as a cost of living proxy – is doing better than target. Basically, on the big outcomes, we are doing better than 2022, but are off target.  Separate World Bank data suggests we are cutting poverty, but not fast enough. 

From the report, we learn that we are somewhere between developing and least developing countries (on a scale from very high development to low (below least developing) development) on the UN’s Human Development Index.  Adjusted for inequality, we are about 70 per cent of the way towards “high development”, but 45 per cent short of “very high development” status. On the flip side, we are a bit more than 20 per cent above “least developed” status, 35 per cent better than “low development”.  This is a useful baseline for our “New Singapore” proponents. 

What about the five BETA pillars (agriculture, MSMEs, UHC, affordable housing, digital/creative)?  

Well, it turns out we only had 1.2 million “fertilized farmers” in 2024/25, we’re below baseline and target on maize production and productivity, but above on rice, we’re still looking for data on edible oils and we’re about the same as before or behind on coffee, tea and potato produce.  We’re doing great on dairy, but falling behind on meat and pretty much nowhere on leather.  Overall, crop and livestock agriculture’s economic contribution is up, but the devil is in the detail. 

MSMEs is a mixed bag, lots of activity not translating into results “kwa ground”. Same picture with universal health care and affordable housing (1,140 houses completed against the annual 200,000 target).  The fairy tales about 330,000 affordable housing jobs created are missing.  And, on digital, it isn’t 40,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable laid, NIMES tells us this regime has done 5,902 kilometres, in addition to a grand total of 800 kilometres of new roads in three years.

There is far much more to digest in this APR. Like mixed macro-economic delivery from slower than targeted growth to an improved public debt and diaspora remittance-driven current account position (in relative terms) set against a chaotic fiscal balance.  Did someone say strong shilling? 

The core trouble with the APR is it isn’t strategic enough; a tough read of outputs as completed activities and implausible outcomes that fail to track the horizontal logic of a proper results chain. 

Let’s conclude with two innocent questions. First, why not use actual government data to explain actual government performance? That’s the first disconnect – between pressers and performance.   At what point, as said before, do we get to a single version of the truth; a unified reporting frame as part of the policy to results cycle?  That’s what good governance looks like. 

Second, what performance are we measuring?  This is our second disconnect, nothing in government’s confused performance reporting gets to the daily lives of Kenyans.  In today’s age of artificial intelligence, here we are, struggling at data level when the world is all about next-level information, knowledge, insight and ultimately, wisdom. That’s what great governance looks like.

No wonder everyday Kenyans have argued, on Ruto@3, that government simply doesn’t get it!