Will Kenya Kwanza's scorecard be enough to win Ruto a second term?

Imagine it is the middle of 2027. At least 200,000 affordable houses are now occupied by Kenyans across the country. Almost 40 million Kenyans are enrolled for social health insurance after a workaround was found to accommodate our informal, non-payroll sector, but the real win in the broader universal health care (UHC) programme is free primary health care that is now available at the country’s grassroots, offering community and facility-level health services. However, the emergency, chronic and critical illness arm of UHC is still an early-stage pilot and underfunded.

Useful gains have also been recorded in agriculture, which drives the economy, ranging from higher production levels, to productivity gains, to producer prices and farmer incomes. The value chain approach – intended to cut through bureaucratic clutter and institutional silos – is working. At the same time, the range of services digitised since 2022 has now surpassed 30,000. And, while off target, gains have been made in ICT connectivity, from fibre optic cabling to Wi-Fi hotspots.

The one area that is still up for debate is whether our education system is taking us forwards or backwards, despite the mass recruitment of at least 150,000 teachers by then. Speaking of recruitment, another question will surround millions in real and virtual jobs created since 2022.

By this time, it is interesting to see how much infrastructure, especially roads and rail, has been done, especially after this administration finally realised that people want to “see development”. At least the Sh44 billion Talanta Stadium, that will cost us at least Sh60 billion extra, is complete.

Furthermore, the Hustler Fund has dished out Sh80–90 billion, the SHA software consortium has pocketed at least Sh30 billion on their Sh108 billion contract, and at least a trillion more shillings has flowed through e-Citizen but still not found its way into the Consolidated Fund (Exchequer).

Going by how their mid-term scorecard was recently presented, we should expect that this summary so far is illustrative of the sort of picture the President and his administration will present as their report card going into 2027.

Of course, there will also be plenty of “macro-jazz” about stabilising the economy – exchange to interest to inflation rates, plus forex reserves. We will probably still be the sixth-largest economy in Africa, and still bottom 50 worldwide on per capita income. Will we overtake Haiti, who are ahead of us on a GDP per capita basis, by then?

By 2027, of course, all of the promises from 2022 will be forgotten. We had about 170 in the manifesto. More recent counts by civic groups and civil society take us up to as many as 400, after all the roadside declarations since 2022. And, as said before, the administration’s official planning document – BETA/MTP IV (the fourth medium-term plan under Kenya Vision 2030) – contains a laundry list of 305 outcome (welfare-level) indicators and 1,522 output (service delivery-level) indicators which official monitoring and evaluation units have refused to report on.

In the idealism we call a “functioning State”, all of these promises and targets might matter. But will they? Remember, we are talking (hypothetically at least) about 200,000 new homeowners, at least 25 million people accessing free primary health care, and possibly millions of happy farmers and, if we stretch our belief, happier informal sector individuals and groups on account of the Hustler Fund. Before you get to the ongoing “bread and circuses” that is empowerment events.

In other words, we go into a 2027 where cost of living is still an issue, except that it will always be one anywhere and everywhere, so the different question for people becomes “has my socio-economics improved” (jobs, incomes, government services, access to assets such as housing)?

We are playing “devil’s advocate” today, but one suspects that anyone seeking to replace the incumbent leadership of this nation on an “issue-based” platform might want to quietly reflect on this backdrop. Let’s consider a couple of angles to what this candidate reflection might look like.

To be clear, the 2027 electoral campaign will be about much more than what we have covered. The presidency itself is broadly about three core roles – security, governance and socio-economy.

Think of these roles as “ends” where politics is the “means”. Think too that every president pursues all three roles, but one is dominant over the others. By this reckoning, as argued before, Kenya’s presidency has given us three “securocrats” and one “econocrat” (let’s keep the jury out on President Ruto), and what we need next is a “governator” – a governance and rule of law leader who will faithfully “implement the constitution” as our overarching policy and basic law.

This is a highly attractive angle that a couple of the more independent-minded potential 2027 candidates appear to be pursuing. This makes sense if one considers that President Ruto is unlikely to score highly on security and governance in the eyes of the public, especially in light of the violent and fatal Gen Z protests, and almost daily reports of corruption across government.

But they will need to take a leap of imagination beyond these narrow, transactional perspectives of security and governance to a progressive mindset that embraces human security as the corollary to human rights, and governance as a two-sided mirror with policy cycle competence (from policy to results) on one side, and public transparency and accountability on the other. To be clear, this is a thinking step beyond the usual trope that “Kenya’s problem is leadership”.

All of this depends on making governance and the rule of law the central issue of 2027 in the belief and expectation that this is the incumbency’s fatal weakness. But isn’t there another angle?

Actually, there is, and it can be done in one of two ways. The first is to work on the basis that BETA is the correct long-term economic agenda for Kenya, and then angle in the idea that, with better governance in particular, more could have been achieved under a different leadership.

In other words, engage the administration’s economics by showing how you would do it better.

The second is to reject, or partly sideline, BETA as our long-term agenda and propose an alternative. This could be as tricky as it is necessary in asking the fundamental question BETA tried to: our current socio-economic model is dead, what must the next one look like for our true socio-economic liberation? Do we move from economic growth to sustainable wealth creation or welfare/wellbeing as models, or is this simply “renaming and respraying” our pain?

Yes, “Wantam” and “Must Go” are interesting noises, but when do we get to real ideas? When will we “free” the economy (as the people) from “overbearing” government? “Hands-on” governator, “hands-free” econocrat or “hands-full” securocrat – which one works for us?

Put it this way. What looks like a governance election in 2027, might also be the economy, stupid! As far as I can tell, one side of the political divide is closer than the other to getting this point.