Why Rutonomics is not working for ordinary Kenyans

The Ruto state’s political and economic tribulations are factors of promises that a rodent has eaten. Every so often, you see President Ruto and sundry regime bigwigs almost everywhere, lamenting about people whom they characterise as tribalists and regime haters. In reality, it’s not about tribes and hate. It is about the failed promise of a hustler state; a promise rats have eaten. 

In August 2017, as Deputy President William Ruto began promising Kenyans a glorious hustler future, the BBC reported that rats were eating Nigeria’s dreams. It was said that Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, was going to work from home for a period of three months. President Buhari had just returned home from the UK, after another three months of offshore medical care. 

The world heard from Buhari’s media team that during his sick leave, rats had invaded his office. They had rendered it unusable. The rodents had chewed the cables and assorted materials in the ornate presidential edifice.

The office would undergo a thorough makeover, get new furniture, and be made truly presidential. It, however, turned out, after his demise in 2025, that the story had been a big hoax, spun to diminish attention to the president’s failing health. 

Many other kindred stories were told about President Buhari. They included narratives that claimed he had a decoy, a striking lookalike, who was often passed off in public as the president. That was Lagos, Nigeria, in 2017–2025. The rat story was just that.

In Nairobi, Kenya, in 2026, if you should perchance find yourself at the intersection of State House Road and Arboretum Road in broad daylight, you are very likely to run into real rats. Restless, well-fed furry black rodents that brashly cut across the road. They feverishly cut their way under speeding cars and dodge motorbikes in their rummaging for stuff in high-end Nairobi. 

I have read somewhere that, spiritually, rats symbolise the contradiction between adaptability, resourcefulness, and wealth, on the one hand. On the other hand is uncleanliness, hidden fears, and deceit.

The interpretation depends hugely on the ruling cultural context. One person will find the rat to be a good omen. Another one will be horrified. Yet, the contradiction wrought by the rat in Nairobi’s suburbia is potent. 

First, who would imagine huge, well-fed rats along State House Road, a stone’s throw away from the national seat of power? What would Albert Camus of The Plague say? Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Love in the Time of Cholera would think of the contradictory tango between dual plagues of cholera and love.

Is the State House and its neighborhood just the right location to find rodents, given the unbridled feasting that is customary in the residence? The road itself speaks to other tensions, beyond rats and their gnawing anxieties. The tensions of two roads that meet at the rat junction, and the contradictions in a sick national economy in search of identity. 

In 2022, the person who is today the principal resident at State House, then the deputy president of Kenya, promised Kenyans what he called “a hustler government, and a hustler economy.” If elected to the highest office in the land, he would build a thriving economy with ordinary Kenyan folk. These are the kind of people whom Victorian England cynically called “the great unwashed.” Karl Marx called them “the lumpen proletariat.”

In Kenya, William Ruto referred to them as hustlers. They were the lower working-class masses. The economy would rise with them from the bottom and reach out for the skies. They were the slum dwellers without bathrooms or running water. Some were chronically unemployed and homeless. Others were menial workers, who lived from hand to mouth. 

In his trademark responsorial-mass brand of campaign rhetoric, Ruto promised the poor a social revolution. Such election promissory notes are welcome in a continent whose leaders are latter-day Mansa Musas. They are by far richer than the countries they rule. Mobutu Sese Seko’s fortunes in Zaire in the 1980s and ‘90s were professed to be higher than the national GDP. Others before and after have strived to outperform him. 

When the search for personal wealth becomes a dominating obsession, a ruler will want to amass more riches than all who ruled before him, rolled into one. The tensions between private personal accumulation and public institutional accumulation account for the rodents in what should otherwise be exclusive locations, like State House Road. 

The road is itself a far cry from its better years. Yet it still stands in stark contrast with Arboretum Road. The two conjoin to tell the story of a sorry national economy. For, one of President Ruto’s pet subjects is road construction. This is used as a metaphor for economic development. Ruto often berates his political adversaries for the poor state of roads in their native home areas, even as he boasts of roads he says he is building. 

So, what story do rodent-infested roads in the neighborhood of the State House tell? Arboretum, so named for the now dwindling treed surroundings, is just about the worst road you could have the misfortune to find yourself driving on.

Potholes have given way to craters, and craters are graduating into gullies that lead to gutters and sundry rat homes. A bumpy ride through the gullies soon gives temporary relief on Ring Road Kileleshwa; thanks to a facelift in the Mwai Kibaki years. 

If going to the right, the ring road disgorges you onto Riverside Drive. The drive, once, long ago, was one of the finest roads in one of the most desirable residential zones in Nairobi.

If you turn to the right, you will find Riverside a total mess of a road. The mess will in turn disgorge you onto a horribly dilapidated Chiromo Road, all the way to Westlands. The picture is the same from Westlands back to Museum Hill. 

Such is the sorry state of roads around State House, Nairobi, the most powerful residential and administrative address in Kenya, the home of the glorious big house on the hill. 

So what about the roads and the rats? These roads speak to 2022 electoral promises that rats have eaten. Charity, they say, begins at home. Have rats eaten President Ruto’s 2022 economic visionary agenda? Ordinarily, infrastructure projects like roads, railways, and airports are useful political props.

It does not matter that they may not necessarily be economically productive. Apart from producing good contracts for the politically connected, they also give glossy impressions of prestige. Above all, they demonstrate presidential power. That the immediate environs of State House are a sorry mess unmasks the lie of the 2022 economic dream.

Part of the dream was that two years into the Ruto presidency, Kenya would have no debts. We will have paid off all our creditors. Taxes will drop drastically and, with them, the cost of living.

Ordinary market women will be rich, as will be those who push heavy carts, laden with farm produce. A new wheelbarrow economy will be the pride of Kenya. The fruits of its labour will fill every Kenyan heart with thanksgiving, in time with the national anthem. 

It has not come to pass. Instead, Kenyans see new wealthy leaders in the midst of a harsh national economy. The tax regime that is enriching them knows the easy targets, which it is hitting aggressively.

They range from salaried workers to small businesses, and from fuel to digital transactions, imports, and domestic consumption. Meanwhile, political leaders carry huge stacks of cash for public display and dispensation. 

It is a huge paradox. How can a country be so poor that citizens are so heavily taxed, yet the leaders are so rich that their car boots are always full of brand new banknotes to show off?

The rich Kenyan leader is a quasi-feudal distributor of charity loaded in his car boot. He is virtually everywhere, at funerals, in church, and at harambees, making self-serving flashy donations. This is not the political economy that William Ruto promised Kenyans in 2022. 

Where do we go from here? From where he is, President Ruto is on a new wave of promises, ahead of next year’s elections. When he should be doing a blow-by-blow audit of his 2022 promises, he is making new promises ahead of 2027. More “new roads” and “new railway lines”, sugarcane grown under irrigation, more universities, and more poor people uplifted from the dregs to glory. 

The pick of the Ruto basket remains “affordable housing,” which he was profiling last week in Azerbaijan and in Kazakhstan as a grand success. Slums have been wiped out in Kenya, the president told spellbound audiences. Now, former slum dwellers all live in skyscrapers. Kenya is Africa’s most successful affordable housing story. 

While Kenyans still live in dingy slums, one question that remains about President Ruto’s “affordable housing” is, affordable for whom? When citizens are heavily taxed to fund a housing programme, or any other programme for that matter, is it to call that programme “affordable”?

Does the Kenyan taxpayer feel comfortable and happy that he is affordably building the Ruto houses? If he is not happy, then what is this paradox of affordable housing? 

From one reckoning, the Ruto economics try to imitate the “developmental authoritarianism” that transformed South Korea to her modern first-world status. Indeed, Ruto has now shifted the conversation from “making a Singapore out of Kenya” to “making Kenya another South Korea.” Korea got here through draconian but hugely disciplined arm-twisting. Within one generation, South Korea migrated from a war-torn, poor country to a major technological and industrial power. How was that possible? 

It was through a combination of what the Ruto state has, and what it does not have, indeed what it probably will never have. What it has is authoritarian political control.

You see President Ruto surpassing independent institutions, capturing Parliament, and attempting to capture the Judiciary. He is suffocating and swallowing political parties, neutering his Cabinet, and moving the country towards one-man rule. 

Nothing is done in government without his knowledge and express consent. Cabinet Secretaries hang in there, stoically. They curate their patience and their pronouncements. What they truly think remains in the silent zones of their inner souls. They must never contradict the boss.

That is what South Korea had that Kenya has today, an almighty leader whose insiders are docile followers who live in fear. On the other hand, his critics “have no brains.” That was President Park Chung-hee, a no-nonsense military man, who seized power in a coup d'etat in 1961. And that is William Ruto, a civilian strongman who was elected in 2022.

Yet the Ruto state has dropped the ball of authoritarian developmental discipline. It is a conflicted state that at once seeks institutional development while being very weak in the war against corruption.

The Kenyan Press is awash with daily reports of billions of shillings stolen from public coffers, virtually with impunity. Even as the Ruto state, therefore, attempts to be the planner, coordinator, financier, disciplinarian, and strategic investor all rolled into one, it lacks the focus and discipline to deliver. 

The Ruto state is also deficient in competent bureaucracy. The senior public office portfolio is awash with favoured homeboys and homegirls. Wherever there is no home-somebody, there is a home-understudy, who is effectively the boss. It does not work that way.

States that will develop flourishing economies do not bargain with competence. If the bureaucracy is incompetent, developmental authoritarianism will sink into ordinary kleptocracy. 

Kenya is, accordingly, modelling itself after the failed states of the world. The elites are getting richer than the government they serve, while not building any productive industries to speak of.

Successful businessmen seem to be busy only to the extent that they are busy wheeler-dealers. Even in trade unions, Kenyans see multiple billionaires who have not been known to produce any wealth. 

When the trade union leader does not speak for labour, he does so not so that the economy will grow. It is more a factor of self-service. His focus is on protecting himself from the wrath of the man in power. Meanwhile, the rat partying goes on. The rodents are busy, eating up our roads and drinking our fuel. 

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser