In a recent visit to Nairobi, Vietnam Gas president Doanh Chau met with top Kenyan officials, including President William Ruto and Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi. What should have been a high-level meeting to discuss opportunity and investment became, instead, a moment of indictment.
After taking the measure of Kenya’s leaders, Chau came away with a sobering assessment that he posted on LinkedIn for all the world to see: Kenya’s current leaders, he seemed to say, are good at talking but piss poor at execution.
One stark comparison drove his point home; Vietnam, a country of 100 million people, generates over 70 gigawatts of electricity. Kenya, with half the population, manages barely 4 gigawatts. Electricity, as we all know, is not a luxury. It is the foundation of modern economies, the starting point for manufacturing, job creation and wealth generation. No investor builds a manufacturing facility where power flickers and outages are routine.
As refreshing as it was to hear an outsider's take on our made-for-entertainment governance style, our Vietnamese friend was not telling us anything we didn’t already know. Our leaders talk a lot. About housing, about agriculture, about the “digital economy”. But what they consistently fail to do is follow through. There is no culture of execution and no commitment to measurable outcomes.
Vietnam and other fast-growing Asian nations understood early that policy is not a PowerPoint deck or a speech. It is action. It is systems. It is getting up at 5 am, not for a press conference or to galavant around the country on a “development tour”, but to ensure power plants work, investors are heard, hospitals are stocked and ports are running efficiently. At least that’s what grown-up leaders do.
In contrast, Kenya’s leadership remains locked in a doom loop—playing to donors, tweeting for clout, commissioning studies that are never implemented and launching programmes that collapse after the first budget cycle. There is, simply put, no grown-up in the room. That’s why, as evidenced by the viral LinkedIn post by the Vietnamese executive, we have become a global punchline. And justifiably so.
Our Gen Z are in on the joke and have created a cottage industry that now thrives on lampooning the absurdity of our self-serious but mediocre leaders. As a general rule, when satire and reality are indistinguishable, something has gone terribly wrong.
Governance is the domain of adults. Not just in age, but in mindset. It’s not about how many speeches you give or how many projects you launch with ribbon-cutting ceremonies. It’s about outcomes. Are more children in school? Are expectant mothers receiving prenatal care? Do farmers have reliable inputs and access to markets? Can new parents access vaccines for their babies?
We must therefore begin to see grand corruption not just as a failure of enforcement, but as a failure of political maturity. If that seems harsh, consider this: what do we call a senior government official who steals public money to build a garish nightclub or splurges on an overpriced watch just to outshine old college rivals? Infantile is the only word that fits.
The late Rasna Warah, a journalist of uncommon moral courage, warned us about this trajectory. “One day,” she said, “someone will look at Kenya and say, here lie the ruins of a country destroyed by greed.” We are inching ever closer to making that prophecy reality, not because we lack talent, not because we lack money, but because those in power refuse to grow up.
Vietnam built energy infrastructure before free trade zones. Singapore aligned incentives with performance and built an economy on integrity and execution. These countries are not magical, they simply chose maturity over melodrama and systems over made-for-TV political entertainment.
Kenya is not a poor country. It is a badly mismanaged one. And mismanagement, at its core, is immaturity, an inability to delay gratification, to think long-term, to serve others before oneself. Our leaders need to put down the microphones and pick up the responsibility of nation-building.
We must stop electing showmen and start demanding grown-ups. Grown-ups who understand that real leadership means less applause and more accountability. Less promise and more delivery. Until then, we remain governed by children.
The writer is a lawyer and media practitioner
