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OMWENGA: Is Ruto keeping his campaign promises?

If there is one thing that can bring down any President, it is over-promising and under-delivering.

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by The Star

Siasa18 October 2023 - 15:14
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In Summary


  • Ruto must also immediately cut wasteful government spending to the same effect.
  • There are many enjoying life on the government dime traveling all over the place and outside the country when the value of such travels is nil.
President William Ruto.

To hear any presidential candidate make promises on the campaign trail, everything they say is music to the ears of their target audience.

The best among them are so good in lying that they can tell one audience one lie here, and another completely opposite lie to another audience elsewhere.

Yet, both audiences will be on their feet cheering and ululating not knowing or caring that the two promises are a contradiction.

This is a phenomenon not confined to one party or another. All party leaders aspiring to be President commit the same sin. In fact, all politicians commit the same sin. There may be exceptions here and there but lying to voters is as old as politics itself.

However, and this is a big however, it is all a matter of degree.

Some politicians tell white lies in the hopes of fooling a few more voters they need to fill their bag. Others do not necessarily lie but over-promise things they know fully well are impossible to deliver but they somehow believe they can have them delivered.

Such over promising is not lying because a lie is a statement one says that can be proven to be false at the time it is made and the person knows the statement is false when they make it.

A politician who over promises may truly believe they can deliver the impossible but when they fail to do so, the disappointment and disillusionment among those he made the promise is equally devastating no different from lies made to the same voter.

The worst of them all are the pathological liars and here they fall in a range between the truly delusional like the twice impeached, now criminally indicated failed former president of the US Donald Trump, and the shameless liars like their hapless cult-like supporters who mostly regurgitate his lies.

Supporters regurgitating lies peddled by those they blindly follow is nothing new in politics but Trump has taken the behaviour to unprecedented and already destructive levels in America.

We have witnessed the same in Kenyan politics, which gets progressively worse each election circle. The incivility and crudeness in social media is just but one example of that.

If there is one thing that can bring down any President or ensure that they are a one-term President, it is over-promising and under-delivering.

We leave it for another day whether then-presidential candidate  William Ruto was delivering whoppers of lies at campaign rallies or he truly believed in the narrative he was preaching of lifting up all those struggling at the bottom up.

That characterisation itself is a fallacy simply because other than the few at the top of the mountain where everyone desires to be, nearly everyone is languishing at the bottom of the mountain. It is just how far bottom they are and what prospects they have to climb up with many simply languishing there through death.

When a government fails to provide for those at the bottom as promised, that is akin to signing one’s death warrant politically. The initial quiet grumblings heard in certain quarters of the President’s strongholds are now more open expressions of disillusionment or disgust. This cannot bode well for the President so the time to do something about it is now.

The recent Cabinet reshuffle was a step in the right direction, but it was not enough.

The head of state needs to take immediate, bold, impactful action to shake things up and there couldn’t be a lower-hanging fruit to pick in that sense than going after cartels and those well-known hoarding stolen public money.

That money—or at least much of it can and should be recovered and used to subsidise various commodities to make life more affordable for the masses who are now suffering with no relief in sight.

Ruto must also immediately cut wasteful government spending to the same effect. There are many enjoying life on the government dime traveling all over the place and outside the country when the value of such travels is nil.

That should be brought to an end—but there is more the President can do to avoid the risk of being a one-term President.

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