Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, ascended to Kenya’s presidency in March 2013. This followed a contested poll that they won with a slim majority of 50.3% of the votes cast.
They took office shortly after the promulgation of Kenya’s progressive constitution in 2010. That gave them a unique responsibility of providing leadership on its implementation and entrenchment.
Article 43 of the new constitution covers economic and social rights. It confers every citizen rights to the “highest attainable standard” of health and access to reasonable standards of housing and sanitation. It also calls for access to adequate food of “acceptable” quality, clean and safe water, social security, and education.
As Kenyatta and Ruto’s second term comes to a close, it is important to establish the extent to which they have lived up to these constitutional expectations.
During the second term of their presidency (2017-2022), Uhuru and Ruto’s government has focused economic strategy on core aspects of Kenya’s Vision 2030, labelled the Big 4 Agenda.
The strategy rested on four pillars. These were food security, affordable housing, universal health care, and manufacturing and job creation. Through it, the government sought to implement projects and policies aimed at accelerating economic growth and transforming lives.
Despite these grand plans, in my view, the government’s economic performance has been a mixed bag.
On the positive side, the outgoing government boasts of infrastructure projects in sectors such as roads and water. Examples include the completed Nairobi Express Way and over 2000 dams that are at various stages of construction.
These projects have the capacity to improve lives. For example, better roads will reduce transport time to deliver commodities to markets while completed dams will lower disease incidence by promoting access to clean drinking water.
But there are negatives too. The country’s performance on job creation was weak, with unemployment rates worsening by 2.93 percentage points from 2.81% in 2013 to 5.74% in 2021. Weak job creation is explained by the not-so-robust economy. Between 2013 and 2021, Kenya’s economic growth (GDP) averaged 4.4% while tax revenues stagnated at approximately 14.8% of GDP.
Uhuru and Ruto’s most prominent economic legacy is runaway public debt, whose growth has not been commensurate with economic performance. In this article, I quickly survey what I believe to be the government’s economic performance highlights since 2013.