Is President Ruto biting more than he can chew or is a strategic deceptor?

Three years down the line, President William Ruto’s promissory agenda reads like a litany of quixotic imaginings and fulfilments. The promises have been both noble and absurd. Like Miguel de Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote, in The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, President Ruto appears to be in the grip of a compulsive desire to do great things in an impractical manner. 

Does he simply not know that his promises are chivalrous and impractical, or does he deliberately speak to impress, while all along he knows that he will not deliver? And why is his slate so broad, and so full, that he will drop from this promised project to the other, almost without warning? Do his people in Government even have prior knowledge of what he is going to promise next, or does he ambush them the same way he ambushes everyone else?

From planting 15 billion trees over a ten year period, to building stadia that will host the English Premier League in Kenya, President Ruto sounds like someone who only needs to open his mouth, and the promissory notes will roll out, on their own energy. Do his officers even know how they will implement them? Do they have what it takes? Have they been discussed before being brought to the public? 

Planting 15 billion trees over ten years, for example, implies doing 1.5 billion trees yearly. This means planting 4.1 million trees per day. With the present population of about 55 million, everyone – including those who were born today – would need to plant 270 trees. But how would you mobilize them, including the infants? What of the land? Expert opinion in Kenya Forestry Services (KFS) has it that Kenya would have to plant 1,000 trees per hectare. That means 15 million hectares, or about 26 percent of Kenya’s territory. What of water, the people, the seedlings? Logistics? In a word, this was an excessively ambitious and unrealistic promise. The prompting remains curious. 

In February, President Ruto told heads of foreign missions to Kenya that last year alone Kenya planted 750 million trees. But in October, of the same year, CS Aden Duale reported that 481 million trees had been planted. Does it seem feasible that an extra 269 million trees were planted in November and December 2024? KWS itself reported that seedlings in the country in 2023/2024 were just about 561 million. Its commitment for 2024 was 300 million seedlings, very significantly below President Ruto’s figure of 750 million. 

Yet, that is how President Ruto rolls. He makes mind boggling promises. He returns to announce mind boggling performance, and results. Kenya began the new year, 2025, riding on the crest of contestation over livestock vaccination. The President declared, in November 2024, that 22 million cattle and 50 million goats and sheep would be vaccinated in 2025. Despite the stormy debate, the programme rolled out in January. Today it sits in limbo. It has funding challenges and operational shortfalls. 

As early as February, the Directorate of Veterinary Services and the Kenya Veterinary Production Institute confirmed to The Standard that lack of funds had sent the programme into early paralysis. John Ngigi, chairman Kenya Veterinary Paraprofessional Association (KVPA), confirmed that the vaccination exercise had been suspended, due to financial and other logistical challenges. 

Significantly, the foregoing two exercises are only the tip of Ruto’s troubled promissory iceberg. State House stands veritably on promissory feet of clay. Both in its manifesto and in early pronouncements, the Kenya Kwanza regime was upbeat with its digital economy agenda. They were going to create a national digital superhighway. They would add 100,000 kilometres to the national optic fibre bone infrastructure (NOFBI), between 2022 and 2027. This would mean an average of 25,000km annually. As of last month, only 13,712km of the 100,000km had been laid, according to the Information and Communication Authority (ICTA). They have under two years left to deliver 86,288 km.

In other areas too, the scenario is equally bleak. Early 2023, President Ruto promised that Kenya would pay off all her debts within the next  two years. There would be no further borrowing. Accordingly, Kenyans began being taxed very heavily. The cost of living spiralled, while payslips no longer made much sense. But, the nation was asked to give the President only two more years. “Give us only two years,” was the refrain from the Cabinet. 

Today, the opposite is the reality. Public debt has surged to stratospheric heights. It stands at about Sh 10.6 trillion. This is up from 8.6 trillion in 2022, when Ruto arrived in State House. Last year’s addition alone was Sh1.4 trillion. It was borrowed at a time when the sum should have been rolling down steadily, towards zero. The cost of living itself continues to spiral. In 2023, maize flour (unga) was the metaphorical bone of contention.

Ruto took over from President Uhuru Kenyatta when a two kilogram packet of unga was retailing for between Sh152 and 156. He promised to bring it to sub Sh100 at the 2023 harvest. “Allow us to subsidise production, and not consumption,” Ruto and his Cabinet Secretaries pleaded time and again, “We promise to bring the cost to less than one hundred shillings!” Post harvests in February 2024 it was Sh172.50. At the time of this writing, it is averaging just below Sh170. 

What drives President Ruto into these quixotic promissory avenues? Is it an overflight of rich imagination? Or, is it deliberate political manipulation of gullible populations? Politicians often believe that the people will not remember the promises that were made to them. George Orwell of Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four celebrity reminds us how alpha politicians manufacture “realistic lies” that they use to manipulate and subdue the populace. He is in his element in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, where the dystopian State runs on the triple mantra of “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Our literati who have understood Orwell, say that leaders like Ruto tend to target specific demographics in the population for this kind of mental manipulation. In Orwell’s own expository of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, citizens are supposed to learn how to hold contradictory opinions,  ideas, and realities in the same head. They believe that both are true. Orwell calls it “doublethink.” Hence, if prices go up, President Ruto will stand before a crowd and talk of how prices have come down. The people will believe him, out of this mental conditioning. 

War is Peace is a ploy that sustains political rifts and conflicts in the nation. The objective is to distract the people’s attention from the great questions of the day. Hence, unending grandiose promises will go hand in hand with verbal wars against both real and imagined political detractors. Ignorance is Strength is just that. Keep them uninformed. Feed them on a super diet of make-believe. They will remain tightly under your control. Kenyans have, accordingly, been fed on numerous fabulous promises, with many more to roll out of the store, it would seem.

In mid 2023, the President announced a plan to deliver a locally manufactured smartphone that would cost below Sh5,000. Assembly began in October, at the Konza Technopolis. Two phones, Neon Smarta and Neon Ultra, were soon after launched on the market. They are retailing for about Sh10,000. The cheap smart phone dream has not been realized. 

What of motorbikes that would not use fossil energies? In the same 2023, Ruto launched the national e-mobility programme. He promised Kenyans 200,000 electric motorcycles, and 100,000 electric cars, for the end of 2024. The reality today is that 9,000 motorbikes have so far been produced. We are still waiting for the cars. Financing and technical production line challenges have been cited as drawbacks. But, do these seem to speak to hurried promises on issues that have not been properly thought through?

It does not look like simple optimism and overpromise based on ambition. It is more like deliberate baiting for political returns. In virtually all his appearances in public, President Ruto cuts the figure of an individual too eager to please. Such political personalities bait the public for votes, in everything they do. No project has genuine altruistic public ends in mind. It is all about the number of votes it could bring. Hence, politicians will go out of their way to understand the great questions of the day, likely to emotionally capture and tame the people. They will make promises that they do not intend to keep. For, they know that the promise is at once a logistical and financial nightmare. Ruto must have known in 2023 that he would not deliver 200,000 electric motorbikes and 100,000 brand new electric cars. Still, he made the promise, for momentary political capital, even as he hoped that Kenyans would forget, and that the rest could be forgotten. 

Elsewhere, in the war against corruption, and ending wastage, melodramatic promises have been made. However, little has been achieved. Legal and institutional frameworks have been laid down. But, they seem to have been made for corrupt visitors, who have yet to arrive from Mars. In November last year, President Ruto ordered the setting up of a mandatory electronic government procurement platform (e-GP). He said it would remove fraud and corruption that is believed to go on through manual procurement. It was launched in April, this year, and from July all public procurement was supposed to be onboarded. 

While e-GP is already in trouble with the Council of Governors, especially, Kenyans will have to wait and see if it will be any different from other government e-platforms. Already there exist worries and fears over billions of shillings that appears to have been stolen, or otherwise negligently lost through the mother e-Citizen platform, as well as the Social Health Authority (SHA) platform. And, veritably every day, moreover, Kenyans wake up to news of yet one more grand corruption scheme. Tens of billions, and often hundreds, are stolen, or lost in suspicious circumstances. Away from the initial excitement, these cases have ended up in the Lorian Swamp of cronyism.

In the end, President Ruto’s grand litany of promises may not be taken too seriously. When he says he is bringing to Nairobi a machine that will daily cook one million chapatis for the city’s school goers, this is to be taken with a pinch of salt. Youth unemployment will continue, despite the grandiose promises made, as will the tax burden. Fuel prices will keep mounting, and there will be no shortage of explanations, most pointing to offshore factors. Healthcare reforms that were meant to make treatment more affordable, and widen coverage, will continue to be a nightmare. 

Promises on agro-processing and infrastructure will continue to be a mirage, as they have been made while the President knows that they will not be funded; for there are no funds. Aggregation and industrial parks are kaput, amidst myriads of land disputes, procurement issues, and corrupt deals. In short, President Ruto’s grandiose promises, the failure to deliver, and unceasing promissory migration, all speak to what social science has called strategic deception. 

In strategic deception, people will promise you heaven, but they know very well that hell is what awaits you. You are promised to see an end to corruption, but when the County Assembly of Nairobi, for instance, swings into action against the county government, President Ruto swings into very swift action to rescue the governor from the wrath of the assembly. But he will at the same time be accusing the National Assembly and Senate of being corrupt, and vowing to take them down. These are all symbolic promises and pledges. Others are only diversionary. They speak to values that the President only thinks the country wants to hear about. They do not speak to serious policy, or action plans. The same networks that drive corruption are left firmly in place. Often, too, they are buttressed by bringing on board persons who are likely to push them up to the next level. 

It is all a big lie agenda. State House believes that you will believe the lie. But even if you will not believe, you will forget. Those who believe and those who forget have nothing to forgive, when the President comes looking for continuity votes in 2027. Where does the balance sit between quixotic illusions, unintended failure, and deliberate deceit in President Ruto’s penchant for big projects? It hardly seems to be about biting what he can’t chew. It looks more like the Orwellian mantra of War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.