The President has just 696 days left to turn Kenya into the 'New Singapore'

Today marks three years since President William Ruto was inaugurated into office; swearing by the Bible and sword to obey, preserve, protect and defend the constitution and all other law while upholding the sovereignty, integrity and dignity of the people of Kenya.

If Kenya was heaven, this is all we must judge him on, in terms of relative progress and absolute performance.  But Kenya is a funny place - since 2010, we have elected into office presidents who didn’t really like our people’s constitution in the first place. 

Think of this as our “base camp” in what a 35-year-old Nelson Mandela in 1957 described to South Africa’s ANC national congress as the valleys of death we must overcome before we get to the mountaintops of our desires.

Let’s throw our usual timing lens into this assessment of Ruto at Three.

Though we might think of today as year three out of five years (with two to go), the reality is the President is 1,096 days, or 61 per cent, into his term of office, with 696 days, or 39 per cent, left to August 10, 2027.  In the “new Singapore” terms Kenyans on X love, he has a little over 99 weeks to deliver us to heaven.

It is also useful to view his first 156 (and a bit) weeks in office (his total term is 256 weeks from inauguration, 261 weeks between the 2022 and 2027 election) in two strands, before and after June 25, 2024. 

So we have the first 93 weeks which were dominated by foreign travel, car sunroofs and “take it or leave it” policy and legislation before Parliament was stormed and we found the army on the streets.  Then we have the 63 (and a bit) weeks since that Gen Z moment.

If we take June 25, 2024 as Ruto’s ‘reset’ moment, then he has already used up 40 per cent of the time he has before 2027.  Like it or not, his presidency will be defined as pre vs post Gen Z.  In other words, 93 weeks before Gen Z, 63+ weeks since Gen Z and “Must Go” and 99+ weeks left for those firmly settled on the “Wantam” thought experiment.  It’s the politics, stupid!

Of course, the apologists in government will not see it this way, while critics will argue that nothing has really changed since Gen Z, and the Ruto administration, like the proverbial ostrich, has buried its head in the sand, thereby exposing its thinking parts. Basically, “business as usual”.

Let’s also not forget that about 100 weeks ago the former Azimio opposition marked Ruto’s first year as D minus (D-). 

Today, we live in “broad-based” settings that our Constitution neither imagines not encompasses.  Better to overthrow the constitution than the government, right?

In case you missed it, we are already assessing Ruto@3, but let’s go to other “big picture” perspectives.  If we take out our ‘handshake’ inter ruptions, Kenya, like elsewhere, typically does a 1-3-1 political-business cycle; a post-election year to recover and settle down, three years of reasonable business and investment certainty and a pre-election year that is the exact opposite.

Kenya Kwanza’s manifesto sought to ride this cycle by sequencing its initiatives, or campaign promises, into immediate/short-term, medium-term and long-term phases. 

So we should have been looking at three 18-month phases — September 2022 to March 2024 economic recovery, March 2024 to September 2025 economic turnaround and September 2025 to March 2027 economic transformation flowing into five pre-2027 election months.

Naturally, its not that linear, but the current impression is we are still in economic recovery (remember Treasury’s most recent 2025/26 Budget Statement?), although we see good signs of turnaround in agriculture and tourism.  The key current worry is that the endless turmoil across our education and health sectors, and the distortion that is our housing agenda take us backwards.

The missing piece in our puzzle remains the turnaround of manufacturing and industry at large.   And corruption is still the elephant in the room; deeply embedded in unreformed government.

In short, at today’s Ruto@3 transformation dateline we are oscillating somewhere between recovery and turnaround at best; but there is enough internal chaos to suggest things could get worse before they get better. 

Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (Beta) could have been done far smarter.  In progress terms, the administration today is roughly 120 to 125 weeks (18 months) off schedule, with less than 100 left.  This is what happens when you run Transformation 3.0 software on Government 1.0 hardware.

There are other broad ways to discern Ruto@3.  The quickest is a check-off on the detail of the 170+ KK manifesto promises for progress or performance, or more specifically, the official policy and planning document that we call the Fourth Medium-Term Plan under Vision 2030 (MTP IV) with its thousands of output (service delivery) and outcome (welfare and wellbeing) indicators. 

The official manifesto check-off is all glossies and graphics on progress, not performance.  So it’s not quite D-, maybe B- for effort and C (plain) for results.  Government’s monitoring and evaluation function appears to have collapsed under this administration, so we have neither annual progress reports nor a mid-term review of MTP IV, at least in public domain.  An educated guess would suggest that target achievement rate across outputs is at 40-45 per cent; less for outcomes.

As said before, Beta was always going to need three to five years for outputs, seven for real outcomes.  Nobody will publicly admit this, instead engaging us in the “macro-babble” of “we have stabilised”.

We could also assess Ruto@3 against the Constitution, if we split it into three.  Basically, has the administration advanced our Article 10 national values and principles towards our better democracy, humanity, governance and sustainable development? 

In other words, has Ruto built our national “balance sheet” of self-rule, self-worth and self-help?  Answers on a postcard please!

Similar questions could be asked of the broader “people” (Chapters 1 to 7) and “institutional” (Chapters 8 to 15) – or demand and supply - sides of the constitution.  The verdict seems mixed.

Which leads us into a final perspective; the notion (as said before) that the Presidency is about three deliverables or outcomes – security, governance and socio-economy.  In this framing, politics is merely an input, not a deliverable or result; simply a means to an end.  Looking at Ruto@3, the immediate answer is he scores badly on security (including ham-fisted responses to dissent) and governance (from dithering service delivery to shadow boxing corruption), and shows middling performance on the socio-economy (from education to healthcare to jobs).