Why President William Ruto Must Be Defeated At The Ballot
There comes a moment in the life of a nation when silence stops being patience and becomes permission. Kenya is approaching that moment. A government elected on the language of hustlers, opportunity and bottom-up prosperity has built an economy in which the smallest businesses carry the heaviest fear: fear of the next tax, the next levy, the next compliance demand, the next interest charge and the next month in which customers simply do not have money to spend.
This is not merely a disagreement over personality. It is a judgment on an economic philosophy. President William Ruto’s administration has too often treated the Kenyan citizen as a collection point and the Kenyan entrepreneur as a revenue target. It has spoken the language of enterprise while repeatedly increasing the cost, complexity and uncertainty of doing business. That contradiction is no longer theoretical. It is visible in empty shops, delayed salaries, auction notices, unpaid suppliers, distressed borrowers and young people whose qualifications have become framed certificates hanging above unemployment.
A healthy government understands that taxation is the harvest of prosperity, not the seed from which prosperity grows. You first create an environment where farmers produce, factories expand, traders sell, innovators build and employers hire. Revenue then grows from a larger, healthier economy. But when the state begins by squeezing weak incomes and fragile businesses, it destroys the very base it intends to tax. It is like demanding more milk from a starving cow and calling the cruelty an economic plan.
The administration will point to genuine areas of improvement. Inflation has at times eased. The shilling recovered from its most dangerous levels. Bank lending rates have declined from their late-2024 highs. Private-sector credit growth improved by May 2026. Reported crime also fell in 2025, while the banking sector’s bad-loan ratio declined from its 2025 peak. Those facts must be acknowledged because an honest argument does not fear inconvenient evidence.
But improvement from a crisis point is not the same thing as success. A patient leaving intensive care is not automatically healthy. A business that is no longer collapsing may still be unable to invest. A family whose food prices rose more slowly may still be eating less. A country cannot be declared transformed simply because a few macroeconomic indicators have stopped flashing red while the lived economy remains exhausted.
The most painful evidence is found among the young. World Bank and ILO modeled estimates place Kenya’s youth unemployment rate at about 15.25 per cent in 2025. The rate jumped sharply between 2021 and 2022 and then remained around 15 per cent through 2025. President Ruto inherited a difficult labour market; he did not create every weakness in it. But he was elected on an explicit promise to change its direction. Three years later, too many young Kenyans are still being told to be patient by leaders whose own children and allies do not wait for opportunity.
A nation that cannot convert the energy of its youth into productive work is not merely wasting labour. It is manufacturing anger, dependency, migration, crime, despair and political instability.
The unemployment figure alone also understates the wound. In Kenya, millions survive in informal work, irregular gigs, unpaid family labour and businesses that earn just enough to reopen tomorrow. A person who sells a few items by the roadside is statistically occupied, but that does not mean the economy has given that person security, dignity or a path to wealth. The real crisis is not only joblessness. It is the mass normalisation of low-quality work without protection, savings, predictable income or a future.
This is why youth unemployment must be read together with the experience of enterprise. Every small business is a potential employer. Every stable trader can hire an assistant. Every growing workshop can absorb apprentices. Every expanding factory can transform an entire town. When policy punishes those businesses through expensive credit, unpredictable taxation, delayed government payments and weak consumer demand, it does more than hurt owners. It closes the door on the next worker who would have been hired.
The banking data tells the same story in a colder language. Non-performing loans are loans on which borrowers have fallen behind. They are not abstract accounting entries. Behind each bad loan is often a business whose customers disappeared, a contractor whose government invoice was not paid, a family hit by job loss, a farmer defeated by costs, or an entrepreneur whose interest burden became heavier than the enterprise could carry.
Central Bank of Kenya data shows the gross non-performing-loan ratio rising from 13.9 per cent in December 2022 to 15.6 per cent in December 2023, then to 17.1 per cent in December 2024. It reached 17.6 per cent in mid-2025 before easing to 15.3 per cent in May 2026. The recent improvement matters, but so does the level. A bad-loan ratio above 15 per cent is still a warning that large parts of the economy have been unable to honour obligations under the weight of difficult operating conditions.
When loans go bad, banks become cautious. They demand stronger collateral, price risk more aggressively and prefer borrowers who are already secure. The entrepreneur who needs credit most becomes the least likely to receive it. That creates a vicious circle: weak cash flow produces defaults; defaults produce tighter lending; tighter lending prevents recovery and expansion; and the absence of expansion prevents job creation.
