By Isaac Dan Bw’Onyancha
In the management of public resources, prudence and foresight are the cardinal virtues that separate serious governance from theatrical administration. Yet, recent policy tendencies in Kenya invite a troubling metaphor.
President William Ruto increasingly appears like the principal of a struggling community secondary school who believes institutional success can be engineered through inflated accounting and symbolic projects rather than through structural investment.
Consider the logic of exaggerated project costing. A kitchen that should reasonably cost Ksh 10 suddenly appears on the books at Ksh 70. That is not merely a budgeting anomaly. It represents a 600 percent inflation that converts a simple public facility into a conduit for rent seeking. In such an environment, the appearance of development replaces the substance of development. The community sees construction. The accounts tell another story.
This fiscal culture becomes even more troubling when it intersects with the disposition of national assets. Selling strategic public resources in order to finance cosmetic infrastructure resembles a principal selling the school’s only cow so that milk can be bought for the day. The institution loses a productive asset while gaining only a temporary consumable. The mathematics of sustainability collapses immediately.
What follows often compounds the absurdity. The proceeds of such sales are channeled into grandiose yet unnecessary symbols of prestige. In the metaphorical school compound, it becomes the construction of an elaborate gate that the modest village school never needed in the first place. Meanwhile, the classrooms remain underfunded, and the laboratories are unequipped.
The narrative offered to the parents and the local community, however, is seductively ambitious. Parents are told that these gestures signal the transformation of the institution into something akin to Alliance High School. At times, the rhetoric escalates further. The country is promised a developmental trajectory comparable to that of Singapore.
These comparisons are politically convenient but economically superficial. Singapore’s rise was not built on inflated procurement or the liquidation of strategic assets for symbolic construction. It was built on disciplined governance, industrial planning, and relentless investment in human capital.
The danger in confusing optics with transformation is that public trust erodes while structural problems deepen. Economic progress cannot be engineered through theatrical announcements or through the recycling of public wealth into headline friendly projects. Development requires institutions that value efficiency, transparency, and long term planning.
Kenya’s challeng, therefore, is not merely political. It is philosophical. The country must decide whether governance will be measured by the spectacle of construction or by the integrity of public finance. Selling the cow to buy milk may create the illusion of abundance for a day. It leaves the institution poorer tomorrow.
- Mr. Onyancha comments on governance issues.