Mr. Ruto, Building Isn’t Development: Houses & Markets Without Factories Is Being Stupid

Development is not a photo-op with concrete in the background. It is a system that creates dignified jobs, raises productivity, and compounds national capability. You’ve mistaken construction for development, and the country is paying for that confusion.
Houses don’t feed a nation; factories do. A home is an outcome of prosperity, not its engine. When you tax workers to fund houses while factories remain shut, you are building roofs over empty wallets.
Markets without production are beautifully tiled warehouses of disappointment. Stalls don’t create supply; firms do. The entrepreneur cannot sell what the economy does not produce.
Your policy mix privileges cement over circuits, ribbon cuttings over production lines. That is why the ground remains jobless while the skyline gets taller. You’re chasing optics, not outcomes.
A real industrial policy maps value chains end-to-end—inputs, skills, power, logistics, finance, export routes—then de-risks them. What we have is a catalogue of announcements with no throughput.
You’ve turned the housing levy into a regressive siphon from working Kenyans to politically connected contractors. That is not mobilizing savings; it is immobilizing consumption and killing demand for the very SMEs you claim to uplift.
Mortgages are scarce and interest rates high; formal incomes are thin. Building supply for buyers who don’t exist is policy theater. Demand is not created by speeches; it is created by good jobs.
Manufacturing multiplies. Every job on the line pulls in transport, services, maintenance, packaging, design, and exports. Construction spikes once; production pays salaries for decades. You keep choosing spikes over streams.
Power prices, outages, and opaque contracts strangle the industry. Until you tackle cost and reliability of electricity—transmission losses, utility governance, IPP opacity—your “Build Kenya, Buy Kenya” is a slogan with no socket.
Agriculture remains a story of inputs without markets and politics without extension. Farmers need predictable prices, storage, cold chains, and rural roads—not hashtags. You can’t industrialize on rotting harvests.
SMEs do not need photo-ops; they need credit that is patient, affordable, and fairly priced. Risk-based lending cannot be a license to gouge. Stand up national credit guarantees, export factoring, and invoice discounting, not handshakes with shylocks.
Taxes must be predictable, simple, and growth-friendly. You’ve done the opposite: volatile levies, retroactive rules, and compliance by fear. Investment does not grow in legal quicksand.
Procurement has become a casino for tender cartels. Development is killed in committee by ghost scopes, change orders, and inflated BoQs. Publish every contract, every variation, every beneficial owner—then watch costs fall.
Your state builds hospitals and forgets nurses, opens theatres and forgets drugs, buys scanners and forgets maintenance. Health outcomes come from systems: financing, staffing, supply chains, and data—not paint.
Education reform is more than changing acronyms. TVETs need industry-linked curricula, apprenticeships, and employer incentives. Graduates must meet the job, not the job meet confusion.
Logistics wins export wars. Ports, weighbridges, freight policy, and last-mile connectivity need discipline, not presidential micromanagement. Reliability beats grandstanding; timetables beat threats.
Digital policy should catalyze innovation, not police it. Excess taxes on online commerce, late-night regulations, and capricious enforcement push enterprise into the shadows. You cannot tax your way to a digital economy.
Devolution was meant to unlock local growth. Instead, counties build gates and fountains while payrolls balloon. Tie transfers to outcomes, not patronage. Measure service, not selfies.
Macroeconomic credibility is not a press release; it is a glide path. Stabilize deficits with spending discipline, broaden the tax base by growing formal jobs, and stop mortgaging tomorrow to survive today.
Public-private partnerships are not shortcuts to transparency. They demand even more sunlight: contingent liabilities, demand guarantees, termination clauses. A PPP without disclosure is just debt in a mask.
Security and justice are an economic infrastructure. When a protest is met with force and contracts with impunity, capital flees. Investors do not fear risk; they fear arbitrary power.
Data is a public good. Build an open dashboard of national KPIs—jobs, exports, cost of power, logistics turnarounds, school learning outcomes—updated monthly, audited quarterly. Let the numbers speak louder than the convoy.
Diplomacy should open markets, not yield platitudes. Chase quotas, standards recognition, and industrial partnerships. The flag must travel with a product, not just a speech.
Urban policy is productivity policy. Transit, water, sanitation, and zoning turn minutes into money. You cannot run a modern economy on traffic jams and informal drainage.
Anti-corruption is not a sermon; it is plumbing: e-procurement, immutable audit trails, asset declarations verified, lifestyle audits enforced, convictions that bite. Fear of getting caught is a policy instrument.
The social contract needs repair. People pay when they see services, not slogans. Trust is cheaper than coercion; it lowers the cost of governing and raises the speed of growth.
Leadership is prioritization. You keep choosing symbols over systems, spending over stewardship, and concrete over competence. That is not ignorance; it is negligence.
A president’s job is to sequence: power, skills, finance, logistics, then housing—because prosperity builds homes, not the other way round. You flipped the ladder and asked the nation to climb.
Markets without factories are corridors of pity. Houses without jobs are quiet prisons. Roads without exports are expensive roundabouts.
Stop counting projects; start counting productivity. Stop announcing billions; start measuring unit costs. Stop staging development; start managing it.
An old proverb says: A tree with shallow roots fears the wind. You’ve planted billboards where roots should be. The wind has arrived.
Kenya needs competence, not theatrics. Systems, not stunts. Production, not propaganda. Until you grasp that, your legacy will be taller buildings casting longer shadows over poorer lives.
History is unforgiving to leaders who mistake motion for progress. Correct course: power affordability, export-grade logistics, SME finance, skills, health systems, and clean procurement. Then—only then—talk about keys and ribbon-cuttings.
The country is not angry because it hates homes. It is angry because you skipped the economy that pays for them. Development is the art of sequencing. Your sequence is wrong.
Fix it. Or step aside for those who know that development isn’t concrete—it’s capability.
About Steve Biko Wafula
Steve Biko is the CEO OF Soko Directory and the founder of Hidalgo Group of Companies. Steve is currently developing his career in law, finance, entrepreneurship and digital consultancy; and has been implementing consultancy assignments for client organizations comprising of trainings besides capacity building in entrepreneurial matters.He can be reached on: +254 20 510 1124 or Email: info@sokodirectory.com
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