Kenya Cannot Afford Another Ruto Mistake

The case against electing William Ruto again should not be reduced to slogans, insults, or tribal reflex. It should be made on evidence. And the evidence says this: Kenya has paid too high a price in taxes, debt pressure, economic anxiety, public distrust, and democratic injury to gamble on a repeat. A country does not change leadership because a president has no talking points left. It changes leadership because the numbers, the institutions, and the national mood all begin pointing in the same direction. Kenya is now dangerously close to that point.

The first problem is the economy that ordinary Kenyans actually live in, not the economy that appears in PowerPoint slides. KNBS reported that real GDP growth slowed to 4.7 percent in 2024 from 5.7 percent in 2023. A government may argue that 4.7 percent is still growth, and that is true. But elections are not won by technical truth alone. They are won on whether households feel progress. When growth slows while taxes stay punishing, households do not experience that as resilience. They experience it as strain.

The second problem is the quality of jobs. Kenya created 782,300 jobs in 2024, but 703,700 of those jobs were in the informal sector. KNBS-linked reporting around the Economic Survey also showed informal work accounted for about 83.6 percent of total employment, around 17.4 million people. That matters because informal work is often unstable, underpaid, unprotected, and vulnerable to shocks. A government cannot keep asking citizens to celebrate job creation while the underlying labour market is telling a story of insecurity. A country cannot tax people like a high-capacity formal economy when most of them survive in a precarious informal one.

The third problem is debt. Kenya’s public and publicly guaranteed debt stock stood at KSh 12.30 trillion at the end of December 2025, equivalent to 67.5 percent of GDP, according to the National Treasury. The 2025 Medium Term Debt Management Strategy went further and acknowledged that the present value of public debt was 63.0 percent of GDP against a benchmark threshold of 55 percent. That gap is not a rounding error. It is a warning. It means the state has far less room to absorb shocks, fund social services, or lower the pressure on taxpayers than it would like the public to believe.

And debt is not just about the headline stock. It is also about what debt does to the rest of the economy. The Treasury’s own 2024/25 Annual Public Debt Report said increased exposure of banks to government securities may contribute to the crowding out of private sector credit, with implications for private investment and growth. That sentence should terrify every entrepreneur in Kenya. When the state borrows heavily and banks find government paper safer than business lending, the SME is the one that bleeds. Credit becomes harder, more expensive, or more selective. A government that crowds out the productive economy cannot then claim to be the undisputed champion of hustlers.

Then there is taxation. The IMF’s Selected Issues report on Kenya said the tax-to-GDP ratio was expected to reach 14.4 percent in 2023 as the 2023 Finance Act introduced about 1.5 percent of GDP in new tax policy and administrative measures. Even the IMF, while backing fiscal consolidation, stressed in 2024 that Kenya needed a more efficient, equitable, and progressive tax regime to restore public trust and tax morale. That wording matters. It is polite technocratic language for a brutal political fact: when a government is seen as greedy, uneven, and detached, citizens stop reading taxation as nation-building and start reading it as extraction.

That is why the 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests were not just another episode of urban anger. They were a constitutional scream from a public that no longer believed the pain was shared fairly. KNCHR documented 60 deaths during the June-July 2024 demonstrations. In a functioning democracy, that number should permanently stain the conscience of any administration. No government that presides over that scale of lethal confrontation with its own citizens should be casually rewarded with another term as though the dead were collateral paperwork.

Governance concerns deepen the case. Transparency International’s 2025 country page for Kenya records a Corruption Perceptions Index score of 30 out of 100 and a rank of 130 out of 182 countries. Corruption perception is not the same as a court conviction, but politics is not a courtroom. Citizens assess whether the state looks disciplined, fair, and trustworthy. When corruption concerns remain this deep, when debt is this high, when taxation is this aggressive, and when trust is this thin, the burden of proof shifts to the incumbent. He is no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

To be fair, Ruto’s defenders will point to areas of macro stabilization. They will say inflation has cooled, that the sovereign rating picture improved in 2025, that debt management has become more orderly, and that external liquidity fears are lower than they were at the height of panic. Some of that is true. But that is exactly why another term would still be a mistake: macro stabilization is supposed to be the floor, not the ceiling. A president does not deserve re-election merely because the ship did not sink. He must show that life became more affordable, institutions more legitimate, and growth more inclusive. That broader case has not been made.

The political question before Kenyans, therefore, is not whether William Ruto can still speak fluently about reform. He can. It is not whether he can still campaign skillfully. He can. It is whether Kenya can survive another cycle of high-pressure taxation, debt-fighting through public sacrifice, growth that does not translate cleanly into dignity, and governance that repeatedly asks citizens for patience while demanding ever more from them. That is a much harder question. And on the available evidence, the safer national answer is no.

Kenyans should not make the mistake of confusing endurance with success. The fact that people have survived this period does not mean the period has been good. The fact that some indicators have stabilized does not mean trust has been repaired. The fact that government can still borrow, tax, and issue speeches does not mean the underlying social contract is healthy. Another Ruto term would not be a fresh experiment. It would be an informed decision made after the country has already seen the method, the priorities, the pressure points, and the consequences.

A second mistake is always more expensive than the first because it is made with knowledge. Kenya now has that knowledge. It has seen the tax instinct. It has seen the debt burden. It has seen the labour market fragility. It has seen the trust deficit. It has seen the human cost of policy arrogance colliding with public anger. The next election should be treated not as a popularity contest, but as a risk-management decision for the republic. On that test, re-electing William Ruto would be a gamble Kenya cannot afford.

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