A Presidency Written In Tears: How Kenyans Will Remember Ruto

Presidents are not remembered by the slogans they repeated, the motorcades they commanded or the applause arranged around them. They are remembered by the condition in which they left their people. William Ruto came to power promising a government for the hustler, a bottom-up transformation and an economy that would reward work. Yet the record now taking shape is of a presidency that repeatedly demanded sacrifice from those who had the least, protected a political class that appeared to have the most, and met legitimate public anger with denial, intimidation and force. This is the legacy many Kenyans will carry: a presidency written not in transformation, but in tears.

Kenya will remember Ruto for turning taxation into the dominant language of government. Families already struggling with food, rent, transport, school fees and medical bills were confronted by new levies, higher deductions and repeated attempts to widen the tax net. The state called it fiscal reform; many citizens experienced it as punishment for earning, buying, travelling, building, farming or running a small business. The housing levy became the clearest symbol of this contradiction: workers were compelled to surrender part of their pay for a programme whose immediate benefit many could neither see nor access. Even when macroeconomic indicators improved, the lived economy remained harsh. The World Bank has reported that real wages fell by more than 13 per cent from 2019, that only about 15 per cent of employed Kenyans held formal jobs in 2024, and that labour-market outcomes remained weak. Growth figures cannot comfort a parent whose income no longer reaches the end of the month.

He will be remembered for presiding over an economy in which opportunity remained dangerously narrow for the young. Roughly 800,000 new workers enter Kenya’s labour force each year, yet formal employment creation has lagged far behind that need. Millions have been pushed into insecure, low-productivity work without stable contracts, social protection or predictable income. The government’s answer has too often been to celebrate jobs abroad as though exporting citizens were a substitute for building industries at home. Labour mobility can be dignified and economically valuable when workers are properly protected. But it becomes a confession of domestic failure when a government treats the departure of its most energetic generation as a flagship employment policy.

Kenya will remember the young men and women who left because their country could not offer them a credible path forward. Reuters reported that the administration sought to send as many as one million workers abroad, while critics warned that Kenya should be creating more jobs locally. Those fears were not imaginary. Amnesty International documented Kenyan women in Saudi Arabia enduring deceptive recruitment, non-payment of wages, gruelling conditions, discrimination and treatment that in some cases amounted to forced labour and human trafficking. Parliament’s own work on labour migration has acknowledged that low-skilled migrant workers remain vulnerable to abuse, poor pay and unsafe conditions. A government may celebrate remittances, but history will ask why so many citizens had to leave home to find dignity, and why some encountered exploitation instead.

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Ruto will also be remembered for the debt trap that continued to dictate national policy. He inherited a heavily indebted state, but leadership is measured by what it changes, not merely by what it blames. The National Treasury’s 2026 Budget Policy Statement assessed Kenya as being at high risk of debt distress. It projected public-debt-related costs of about KSh1.54 trillion for the 2026/27 financial year and placed the present value of public debt at roughly 65 per cent of GDP. When debt service absorbs such an enormous share of public resources, hospitals wait, schools struggle, counties receive money late, development projects stall and citizens are told to accept further taxation. The tragedy is not simply that Kenya owes money; it is that ordinary people are repeatedly asked to pay for borrowing whose value they often cannot see in their daily lives.

The scale of pending bills tells another part of this story. By December 2025, the government’s verification committee had analysed 91,911 claims valued at KSh637.6 billion. Behind those figures are contractors, suppliers, small manufacturers, professionals and family businesses that delivered goods or services but waited months or years to be paid. A government that delays payment while demanding punctual taxes from the same businesses does not merely create inconvenience; it destroys working capital, jobs, creditworthiness and trust. It can bankrupt the very enterprises that are expected to create employment. Under such conditions, the slogan of supporting small businesses becomes hollow.

Kenya will remember Ruto for the widening distance between official promises of integrity and the stubborn reality of corruption. The Auditor-General has continued to flag unsupported expenditure, weak controls and recurring audit queries across public institutions. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s own surveys identify bribery, favouritism, abuse of office, tribalism, nepotism and embezzlement among the leading forms of corruption and unethical conduct in public service. Its 2025 findings also showed the national average bribe rising from KSh4,878 to KSh6,724. These are not abstract governance problems. Every stolen shilling is a medicine not bought, a classroom not built, a road left unfinished, a water project abandoned or a young person denied a fair opportunity.

A president cannot claim a clean legacy merely because investigative agencies exist. The constitutional burden of leadership is to create a culture in which theft has consequences, public appointments are based on competence, conflicts of interest are confronted and public officers understand that state resources are not political property. Instead, Kenyans have watched scandals arise, outrage peak, committees sit, officials exchange accusations and accountability fade. The recurrence of audit queries reveals a system that has learned how to survive exposure. When the same failures return year after year, corruption is no longer an exception within government; it becomes part of the government’s operating environment.

The health sector will form a painful chapter in this legacy. The transition from the National Hospital Insurance Fund to the Social Health Authority was sold as a route to universal healthcare. Yet patients, hospitals and legislators repeatedly reported confusion, rejected claims, delayed reimbursements and gaps between the benefits promised and the bills actually covered. A 2025 parliamentary assessment of SHA’s use of funds and the challenges facing facilities called for rejected claims to be returned for correction rather than simply discarded. The Auditor-General and civil-society organisations also raised questions about procurement, system control and transparency. For a sick Kenyan, these are not technical disputes. They determine whether treatment begins, whether a hospital admits a patient and whether a family must sell land, borrow money or watch a loved one suffer.

Education has carried its own uncertainty. Parents and students have faced contested university funding arrangements, changing classifications, delayed disbursements and anxiety over who qualifies for support. Courts found serious constitutional defects in the initial funding model, including the lack of adequate public participation, before later appellate proceedings allowed implementation to continue while the legal dispute evolved. The larger failure is political: education policy should not leave families guessing whether a child admitted to university can afford to report. A government that describes the youth as the future cannot make access to education feel like a lottery.

But the defining wound of this presidency may be the bloodshed and fear that followed young Kenyans into the streets. The 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests began as a powerful democratic statement from a generation that refused to be governed without being heard. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented 60 deaths and 601 injuries in connection with the protests between June and July 2024. Behind each number was a Kenyan with a name, a family, plans and a right to life. The withdrawal of the Finance Bill did not erase the deaths, restore the injured or answer the question that will follow this administration for years: why did a government elected by citizens respond to citizens with lethal force?

The pattern did not end in 2024. In its 2025 state-of-human-rights report, KNCHR documented 57 violations of the right to life, most occurring during the civic unrest of June and July. It recorded 661 demonstrators injured, 149 people arbitrarily arrested and 15 reported abduction cases during the period under review. The Commission described heavy police deployments, violent disruption of demonstrations, hooded officers, vehicles with concealed identification and masked perpetrators who brutalised protesters and bystanders. These findings describe more than failures of crowd control. They reveal the corrosion of the constitutional relationship between the citizen and the state.

Ruto’s own words hardened that fear. In July 2025, he publicly directed police to shoot people who destroyed property in the legs. A president may rightly insist that violence, arson and looting are crimes. The law must protect citizens, businesses and public infrastructure. But the head of state must also understand that police power is governed by the Constitution, statute, necessity, proportionality and accountability – not by political anger. When presidential rhetoric normalises shooting as a response to unrest, it lowers the threshold for abuse and places every protester, journalist, medic and passer-by at greater risk.

Kenya will remember the abductions and enforced disappearances that created a culture of dread. Activists, bloggers and government critics were taken by unidentified people, held outside lawful procedures or found after public pressure. KNCHR reported a resurgence of arbitrary detention, torture, abductions and enforced disappearances allegedly involving security officials. The cruelty of an abduction extends beyond the person taken. It forces parents to search police stations, hospitals and mortuaries; it teaches citizens that criticism may carry a hidden punishment; and it turns the state from a source of protection into a source of fear. A democracy cannot remain healthy when people must calculate whether a social-media post might make them disappear.

The media and digital public square have also been squeezed. KNCHR warned in 2025 that freedom of expression and media freedom were under persistent threat, citing harassment, intimidation, assault, arbitrary detention and obstruction of journalists. Amnesty International later reported coordinated digital tactics used to intimidate and discredit young activists. This matters because authoritarianism rarely arrives in one dramatic announcement. It advances through small acts of intimidation, vague laws, surveillance fears, selective arrests, propaganda and the gradual exhaustion of those who ask questions. The public begins to censor itself, and power becomes less accountable because truth has become costly.

Ruto will be remembered for his confrontation with the Judiciary. In January 2024, he accused judges of corruption and said he would ignore court orders that he believed obstructed government programmes. The Law Society of Kenya, civil-society organisations and the Chief Justice warned that defiance of court orders would invite anarchy and destroy the rule of law. A president is free to criticise judgments and to appeal them. He is not free to decide which orders deserve obedience. The Constitution is not binding only when it agrees with the Executive. The pattern remained visible in June 2026, when a High Court found the Health Cabinet Secretary in contempt over the continuation of work on a disputed facility despite a suspension order. Each act of defiance tells public officers that legality is negotiable when power is sufficiently high.

He will be remembered for a style of government that often treated criticism as hostility and dissent as sabotage. Citizens who questioned taxes were accused of resisting development. Protesters were described through the language of criminals, anarchists or coup-makers. Civil society was treated with suspicion. Critics were answered with lectures rather than accountability. This approach deepened national division because it replaced listening with labelling. Democratic leadership is not the art of surrounding oneself with applause; it is the discipline of hearing uncomfortable truths without reaching for coercion.

Kenya will also remember the contradiction between official extravagance and public austerity. Citizens were told to tighten their belts while government travel, political mobilisation, offices, advisers and ceremonial spending continued to provoke anger. Whether every disputed expenditure was unlawful is not the only question. Leadership also carries a moral test. In a country where children learn in overcrowded classrooms, hospitals lack basic supplies, farmers struggle with input costs and graduates cannot find work, the appearance of excess at the centre of power becomes an insult. Austerity that applies only to the governed is not reform; it is inequality administered through the budget.

Not every crisis facing Kenya began with William Ruto. Debt, corruption, police brutality, inequality, unemployment and institutional weakness were inherited from previous governments and have roots stretching back decades. But he sought the presidency knowing those problems, promised to correct them and asked Kenyans to trust him with extraordinary power. His legacy will therefore be judged by whether he reduced those injustices or deepened them, whether he strengthened institutions or intimidated them, and whether he made citizens safer or more afraid. In too many areas, the evidence points in the wrong direction.

History will not remember this administration through edited speeches, roadside launches or carefully staged photographs. It will remember the mother turned away from a hospital, the graduate sending applications into silence, the trader suffocated by taxes, the supplier ruined by unpaid bills, the farmer producing at a loss, the migrant worker abused far from home, the parent searching for an abducted child and the family burying a young person killed during a protest. These are the human records against which political claims will be measured.

William Ruto still has time to change the direction of his presidency, but time does not erase what has already happened. Repair would require more than new slogans. It would require justice for those killed, truth about abductions, prosecution of corrupt officials, obedience to court orders, protection of the media, humane policing, credible job creation, fair taxation, transparent healthcare, payment of pending bills and a public finance system that serves citizens before political interests. Without such a break, this will be his defining legacy: the president who promised to lift the hustler but increased the burden, promised opportunity but exported desperation, promised constitutional government but repeatedly tested its limits, and promised hope while too many Kenyans learnt to associate his rule with pain, fear and tears.

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