William Ruto Has Broken Kenya — And Here’s the Receipts

A no-holds-barred look at how Kenya’s presidency became a master class in broken promises, collapsed services, and forgotten people.

Table of Contents

Section	Topic
1	The Man Who Sold Kenya a Dream
2	Mama Mboga Was Just a Prop
3	Boda Boda Boys Were Used, Then Dumped
4	The Cheap Loan Lie That Crushed Hustlers
5	Education Is Burning
6	Nurses Are Striking at KNH — People Are Dying
7	The Economy Is on Life Support
8	Leadership? What Leadership?
9	Kenya Deserves Better — The Case for Accountability

1. The Man Who Sold Kenya a Dream

September 2022. William Samoei Ruto walks into State House with a Bible in one hand and a campaign slogan on his lips — “Bottom-Up Economic Model.” It sounded like something Kenyans had never heard from a president before. Not top-down, not trickle-down, but bottom-up. The hustler would finally have someone in their corner. Markets erupted with cautious optimism. Mama mboga smiled. The boda boda rider gassed up his bike with hope. Small-scale traders, roadside mechanics, fish mongers at Gikomba — all believed this man was different. He had lived like them, he said. He understood their pain, he said. Now his term is almost over, and the receipts tell a completely different story.

Ruto ran one of the most emotionally charged campaigns Kenya has seen in decades. He weaponized poverty, packaging his humble origins as proof that he would govern with empathy. He promised affordable housing, universal health coverage, cheap government-backed loans, revamped schools, properly staffed hospitals, and an economy that would actually breathe life into the ordinary Kenyan’s wallet. He was going to be the president who remembered the forgotten. What happened instead is that those very people — the forgotten — got forgotten again, this time by the man who swore he never would.

2. Mama Mboga Was Just a Prop

During the campaigns, Mama Mboga was everywhere in Ruto’s speeches. She was the face of the hustler nation. She was the reason the “Bottom-Up” model existed — to reach her, lift her, give her government-backed credit so she could stock her kiosk, feed her children, and send them to school with shoes on their feet. It was a powerful image. It was also, as it turns out, a borrowed image that the government had no intention of returning with any value attached.

Today, the cost of tomatoes has tripled. Onions. Cooking oil. Sukuma wiki. The basic items that mama mboga sells have become unaffordable not just for her customers but for herself as a trader trying to restock. The value-added tax expansions that came with Ruto’s Finance Bills hit small traders the hardest. There was no subsidy, no relief fund, no government program specifically designed to cushion the informal trader. The government that promised to be her champion became the very machine that squeezed her margins. The credit cooperatives Ruto promised — the Hustler Fund, a watered-down version of what was campaigned — came with caps so low they barely covered a week’s worth of stock for most traders. Mama mboga was a campaign prop. Her suffering turned out to be Ruto’s ladder, not his cause.

3. Boda Boda Boys Were Used, Then Dumped

Nobody showed up to Ruto’s rallies more faithfully than the boda boda riders. They were his enforcers, his transport network, his most visible symbol of grassroots support. They showed up in their hundreds at every campaign stop, revving engines, wearing campaign T-shirts, chanting his name. Ruto talked about them constantly. He promised to subsidize fuel for them. He promised affordable helmets and safety gear through government programs. He promised to formalize and protect their trade. They believed every word.

Fuel prices under Ruto’s presidency have climbed to levels that eat directly into the thin margins these riders depend on. The fuel subsidies that briefly existed under the previous government were scrapped. No meaningful government program has emerged to formalize the sector, protect riders from rogue county by-laws, or give them health insurance. The boda boda rider today earns less in real terms than he did before Ruto took office, because the cost of fuel, the cost of repairs, and the cost of food have all gone north while his fare has barely moved. These men — who carried the campaign on their backs — have been left exactly where they were, except now they are poorer and fuel is more expensive. That is not a coincidence. That is policy failure.

4. The Cheap Loan Lie That Crushed Hustlers

The Hustler Fund launched with fanfare. Ruto stood at a podium and announced it as a revolution — a government-backed credit facility that would unlock capital for the millions of Kenyans locked out of formal banking. No collateral. Low interest. Quick disbursement via mobile phone. It sounded like the answer to everything. Hundreds of thousands of Kenyans signed up. The amounts they received ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand shillings — amounts that barely covered a single day’s trading capital, let alone the kind of seed money that could actually start or grow a small business.

The Hustler Fund was not a lending revolution. It was a microfinance product dressed in presidential clothing. Worse, the repayment terms and the tiny loan caps made it more of a public relations tool than an economic lifeline. Meanwhile, the big campaign promise — affordable government loans through SACCOs, county governments, and enterprise funds — either stalled in bureaucratic limbo or was quietly abandoned. The real cost of credit in Kenya remains punishing. Commercial banks charge rates that make meaningful borrowing impossible for the average hustler. And so the cycle that Ruto promised to break — poor people locked out of capital — continued uninterrupted. The Hustler Fund helped Ruto’s political brand. It did not help the hustlers.

5. Education Is Burning — And Nobody Is Putting Out the Fire

Ruto campaigned on education with specific, concrete-sounding promises. Free laptops for students. Improved infrastructure in public schools. More teachers hired to address the crippling teacher shortage. Junior Secondary School — a bold new policy — would be implemented smoothly and fully funded. Parents exhaled. Teachers leaned in. School board officials made plans. Then the CBC Junior Secondary School transition happened, and it was one of the most chaotic policy rollouts in the country’s recent history.

Schools received Grade Seven students without classrooms. Teachers were posted without salaries being sorted. Parents were sent bills for “levies” that contradicted the government’s own free education promises. The Teachers Service Commission has been at war with striking and underpaid teachers for months. New teacher recruitment has moved at a pace that would embarrass a colonial-era bureaucracy. In public primary schools across the country — in Turkana, Kisumu, Kitui, Kwale — children sit in crumbling structures, sharing textbooks five to one, taught by overworked instructors who have not received their teaching allowances in months. This is what Ruto’s education promise looks like on the ground. It is not a policy setback. It is a failure of political will.

6. Nurses Are Striking at Kenyatta Hospital — And People Are Dying

Kenyatta National Hospital — the country’s largest and most critical public health institution — is in crisis. Nurses are on strike. Not because they are being greedy. Not because they are being unreasonable. They are striking because the government that promised universal health care has failed to pay agreed salaries, has not hired enough staff to cover wards that see thousands of patients daily, and has left medical workers operating in conditions that make quality care nearly impossible. Patients are lying in corridors. Surgical procedures are being delayed. People with conditions that are treatable — — are deteriorating because the health system cannot process them quickly enough.

Ruto’s flagship Universal Health Coverage initiative — rolled out with great ceremony and green-and-white branding — was supposed to fix exactly this. The Social Health Authority replaced NHIF with promises of broader coverage, simpler registration, and better hospital reimbursements. What happened in practice was confusion, delays, hospitals not receiving reimbursements on time, and a registration system that left millions of the most vulnerable Kenyans — the rural poor, the elderly, informal workers — outside the coverage net. The promise was universal health. The reality is a nurse on the street outside KNH holding a placard, and a patient inside who cannot find anyone to attend to them. That is not a systems teething problem. That is a government that said one thing and did another.

Kenyans Unregistered

Still outside Social Health Authority coverage as of 2024

Nurse Shortage

Public hospitals running below minimum recommended nurse-to-patient ratios

Major Strikes

Health sector strikes at KNH under Ruto’s watch in under two years

Salary Arrears Cleared

Months of nursing allowances still unpaid after repeated government assurances

7. The Economy Is on Life Support

The numbers are not lying even when the government is. Inflation spiked. The shilling hit record lows against the dollar, at points trading past 160 — numbers that would have triggered a national emergency conversation under any previous administration. Food prices surged. Electricity bills became a topic of genuine dread in Kenyan households. The Kenya Power tariff increases that came through during Ruto’s tenure were not accompanied by improved service — instead, blackouts continued, voltage fluctuations destroyed appliances in homes and small businesses, and prepaid electricity units burned through in days rather than weeks.

The Finance Bills that sparked the Gen Z protests of June 2024 — protests that led to the storming of parliament — were a symptom of a government that had run out of ideas and turned to the tax base as its only tool. Taxing bread. Taxing cooking oil. Taxing sanitary towels. Taxing cooking gas. The government attempted to tax the very survival items of people already struggling to stay afloat. When young Kenyans took to the streets to reject that bill, they were not just rejecting a finance act. They were sending a verdict on two years of broken economic promises. The president responded by forming a broad-based government, a political maneuver that had nothing to do with fixing the economy and everything to do with buying political survival. Kenya’s GDP growth projections have been revised downward. Foreign direct investment has been tepid. Unemployment — especially youth unemployment — remains stubbornly high. The bottom-up economy has not trickled up. It has not trickled anywhere.

8. Leadership? The Country Is Running Itself

A president’s primary job — beyond policy — is to lead. To project a sense of direction, to make hard calls with consistency and moral clarity, to be present and accountable when things go wrong. Ruto has been present at church services, international conferences, and political rallies with unusual frequency. He has been notably absent from the kind of leadership moments that define whether a president is governing or just occupying space. When nurses went on strike, there was no presidential address. When the economy contracted, there was no accountability press conference. When Gen Z marched and died, the initial presidential response was to dismiss them as foreign-funded criminals — a characterization so tone-deaf it shocked even some of his supporters.

Cabinet reshuffles have become a sport rather than a governance tool. Ministers have been appointed, fired, and reappointed in cycles that suggest no coherent staffing strategy. The government has had more U-turns than a matatu negotiating Nairobi’s one-way streets. Policies are announced, then quietly shelved. Deadlines are set, then missed, then reset, then missed again. The affordable housing program — Ruto’s most aggressively marketed initiative — has moved at a pace so slow that analysts have begun questioning whether the primary motivation is housing delivery or land politics. Leadership requires consistency. It requires showing up even when it is uncomfortable. What Kenya has is a government that governs by announcement and disappears when implementation begins.

“Ruto came in promising to be the president of the hustler. Two years later, the hustler is hustling harder — not because of government support, but despite government failure.”

9. Kenya Deserves Better — The Case for Full Accountability

The word “impeachment” has been floating in Kenya’s political air since before Ruto’s first anniversary in office. That word exists in the constitution for a reason. Article 150 of the Constitution of Kenya provides mechanisms for removing a president who has fundamentally failed in the execution of their duties. The standard is not perfection — no president achieves perfection. The standard is gross violation of constitutional obligations, and a government that has systematically broken campaign promises, failed to deliver on health, education, and economic security, and responded to public grievance with dismissal and political maneuvering, is a government that has moved dangerously close to that threshold.

Kenya is not a country without options. The Gen Z protests proved that ordinary citizens — young, unaffiliated, mobile-phone-wielding, digitally organized citizens — can force a government to back down. They forced the withdrawal of Finance Bill 2024. That is not a small thing. That is a country finding its voice and using it. The question now is whether that voice will stay loud enough, long enough, to force genuine accountability. Not just on one Finance Bill. On the totality of a presidency that took office on the strength of promises it never intended to keep. Mama mboga deserves more. The boda boda rider deserves more. The nurse striking outside KNH deserves more. The student sitting in a crumbling classroom deserves more. Kenya deserves more. And right now, the only way that “more” arrives is if every Kenyan who cares about this country holds this government to the fire of public accountability — loudly, consistently, and without apology.

Enjoy KWM Podcast 24/7. It’s FREE!

About The Author