By Justin Muturi >>> There was a time when Kenya stood tall in the region. Nairobi was the hub of commerce, diplomacy, and innovation. Investors chose Kenya first. Our neighbors measured their growth against our performance. Today, that leadership is gone. Uganda is preparing to export oil.
Tanzania has doubled its tourist arrivals. Ethiopia is exporting power. Kenya, once the model, is reduced to importing, begging, and borrowing. From being the region’s leader, we have become the region’s target market.
This collapse is not an accident. It is the product of incompetence, ineptitude, cluelessness, and unprecedented greed at the very top. At the center of it all is President William Ruto.
Ruto came to power on promises of a “hustler nation,” a bottom-up economic revolution, and the rhetoric of hope. He spoke the language of ordinary Kenyans, convincing many that his presidency would finally be the bridge between privilege and poverty.
Yet less than three years into his term, the evidence is damning: his government has not only failed to deliver; it has actively sabotaged the future of the country.
Consider the economy. Kenya’s debt burden has reached levels that choke growth. Nearly half of all revenues are swallowed by debt service. Public hospitals lack drugs, schools send children home for unpaid fees, road projects stall, yet billions are wasted on delegations to State House where handouts and allowances masquerade as “development meetings.” Instead of being a driver of growth, the presidency has become the single largest threat to our economic survival.
Then there is corruption. Ruto promised to fight graft, but State House has become the epicenter of plunder. The Auditor General recently flagged billions disguised as “printing costs” at the presidency. Delegates troop to Nairobi to receive KSh 10,000 facilitation fees, while governors and MPs pocket millions to transport them.
Each meeting costs taxpayers hundreds of millions, yet no single hospital, school, or water project can show for it. This is not development; it is legalized looting under the banner of politics.
Meanwhile, Ruto has turned prayer into a tool of deception. He prays for wisdom while stealing. He prays for unity while dividing. He prays for prosperity while destroying. His prayers are not petitions.
They are performances. Every national event is reduced to a theatre of staged piety, with the President quoting scripture even as his government taxes bread, water, and medicine. It is a grotesque display of hypocrisy, faith weaponized as a shield for corruption.
The tragedy is not only in what is being stolen, but in what is being lost. Nations rise by investing in their people. The United States funds research and innovation at its universities, producing global companies that dominate the digital age. China builds infrastructure to fuel trade. Rwanda invests in order, efficiency, and tourism.
Kenya invests in politicians’ pockets. Instead of channeling resources into innovation, healthcare, or manufacturing, we funnel them into allowances, foreign trips, and inflated contracts. The result is predictable: stagnation at home, humiliation abroad.
Our neighbors are rising while we regress. Uganda’s oil will transform its economy. Tanzania’s tourism is now a pillar of regional growth. Ethiopia’s power exports are feeding industries across borders. Kenya, instead, is reduced to a begging bowl, knocking on the doors of the IMF and World Bank for bailouts while its leaders live like emperors. This decline is not just embarrassing; it is dangerous. We are losing our competitiveness, our influence, and our dignity.
And yet, the President behaves as if all is well. He flies across the globe almost monthly, chasing per diems and photo opportunities. He lectures Kenyans about patience while staging billion-shilling political meetings at State House. He blames others for problems he created. He pretends to lead while actually campaigning for 2027. It is government by performance, not by substance. The economy burns while the President plays to the cameras.
The cost of this failure is not abstract. It is felt by every Kenyan who cannot afford unga, every student sent home for lack of fees, every patient turned away from a hospital without medicine. It is seen in the hopelessness of jobless graduates, the despair of farmers with no markets, and the exhaustion of citizens suffocated by taxes. Kenya’s future is being mortgaged to feed the greed of a ruling elite.
What makes Ruto’s presidency particularly destructive is the combination of greed with cluelessness. Greed alone might still build something if directed wisely. Cluelessness alone might still allow capable technocrats to steer the ship. But greed and cluelessness together are a death sentence for any nation. That is what Kenya is suffering under today.
William Ruto did not seize power to develop Kenya. He seized it as a business opportunity. To him, the presidency is not a platform for service but a marketplace for personal enrichment. Strikes, collapsing healthcare, failing institutions, these are problems for those who are “not clever enough.” In his worldview, the poor are poor because they lack his cunning. That is why he laughs at those who complain about him monetizing the presidency. To him, it is not theft. It is smart business.
But it is not smart. It is suicidal. A nation cannot be looted into prosperity. A people cannot pray their way out of deliberate misrule. Kenya cannot survive under leadership that treats power as a cash cow. Ruto’s incompetence, ineptitude, cluelessness, and unprecedented greed have not only doomed the present. They are actively destroying the future.
The tragedy is that Kenyans, once the hope of the region, now watch their neighbors surge ahead while they sink deeper into debt and despair. Unless there is radical change, history will record this presidency not as the dawn of a hustler nation, but as the final betrayal of a struggling republic.
The writer is a former Attorney General, Cabinet Minister and Speaker of the National Assembly
