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.
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 unfin