Ruto still needs to work on earning public trust through effective delivery
Ken Opalo
By
Ken Opalo
| Nov 22, 2025
In this year’s state of the nation address, President William Ruto highlighted his administration’s achievements as well as plans for the future. A close reading of the speech reveals a number of interesting patterns.
First, the president reiterated his “becoming Singapore” theme by comparing Kenya to the East Asian tigers. While he was wrong to note that Kenya and those countries were at the same level of development in the 1960s (they had much stronger states, more educated people, and more ambitious elites), one hopes that the administration will actually take time to internalize what exactly made the Asian miracle happen (it was strategic independence, focus on priority reform areas, and a ruthless approach to making the state-supported private sector more productive).
Second, the president touted a number of achievements tied to macroeconomic recovery. Here, the real deserved credit is on stabilizing Kenya’s macroeconomic outlook and avoiding default. Things were really bad when the president took office in 2022. Default was a real possibility. That said, the manner in which we avoided default leaves a lot to be desired.
The president and his administration imposed punitive taxes on the small subset of workers on payroll, even as senior public officials went about stealing public resources and proudly flaunting the loot. This resulted in a generalized breakdown of trust and erosion of legitimacy that culminated in the storming of parliament in 2024.
The point here is that the president owes the public a good faith effort to spend hard-earned tax shillings in the most prudent manner possible; and public acts that will restore the state’s legitimacy and general public trust in his government.
Third, the president highlighted several investments in infrastructure, including power generation, roads, housing, dams, and more. On this score, most objective observers agree that we could do with a lot more investments in infrastructure. However, the best way to elicit public sacrifice and appreciation of government efforts would be to ensure that these investments are done the most transparent manner possible.
Public projects should not be viewed as opportunities for blatant theft in the form of padded contracts that deliver shoddy work. Here, the experience with the affordable housing project is instructive. The project has so far delivered far fewer houses than what was promised. Furthermore, the randomness of the construction of the houses that exist suggest that the point of the program was taxation to shore up our fiscal capacity, and not to deliver social housing. In short, some honesty would have helped.
Finally, the president’s depiction of social programs rang hollow. The education sector is a mess. The curriculum reforms were poorly implemented. Higher education is practically on its knees. And we are not producing nearly as much research as we need to climb up the economic ladder. The same goes for the health sector. There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that medicines are available in public hospitals.
That doctors and other medical staff show up for work. And that we minimize as much as humanly possible the rates of maternal and infant mortality. Yet the government’s focus still remains just on the financing side of things (again, fiscal stability takes priority over all else).
All this to say that the president so far has a middling to bad grade. There is a lot more to be done, starting with earning the public’s trust and then ensuring that execution of projects prioritizes outcomes and not just the shoving of huge sums of cash out the door.
The writer is a professor at Georgetown University