What Ruto at 4 "Scorecards" tell us about data anarchy

President Ruto addresses congregants at Voice of Salvation and Healing Church in Kisumu as he begins a four-day tour of the Nyanza region, September 13, 2026. [Daniel Ogendo, Standard]

With last Sunday marking the fourth anniversary of President William Ruto’s September 2022 inauguration into office, we are seeing plenty of analysis on his administration’s performance across mainstream and social media.  Technically, by now Ruto@4 should mean the same thing as Opposition@-1 (minus one), yet, as we are often reminded, “they have no alternative agenda”.

Ideally, we should today be mapping Ruto@4 as the ledger of power against Opposition@-1 as the countdown to alternative governance, built on the true baseline of accountability as the 2010 constitution, not the 2022 manifesto.  One people-focused approach might even be to frame this assessment against three “rights clusters”: socio-economic rights (Article 43), civil and political rights (like assembly and accountability) and group and collective rights (gender, youth and the marginalised).  Then there would be a real story to tell beyond “macro-babble” and “shiny things”.

Instead, we are back to our usual game of statistical hide-and-seek.  On one side, an economically exhausted public is regaled with the polished optics of "Ruto@4" milestones, where the Executive uses podiums and sunroofs to confidently claim to have fulfilled the "majority" of its mandate.

On the other side, independent tracking says otherwise. First, we learn – from Kenyans.co.ke – about the disconnect between 455 distinct, specific promises made directly by this administration, of which only 12 (or 2.6 per cent) have been fully delivered.  Apparently, this tracking was filtered from over 750 announcements and declarations made by this regime since September 2022.

At the same time, Mzalendo’s Promise Tracker, which isolates between 254 and 259 policy promises in the 2022 manifesto, notes that fully completed goals hover at a dismal 7 to 10 per cent (19 to 25 promises), with 143 to 150 promises stuck in a legal-bureaucratic “black hole” of "ongoing" status, 56 promises not started, 15 to 16 classified as stalled, 20 flagged as broken and 4 to 5 completely modified.  That’s as head-shaking and shape-shifting an assessment as it gets!

How do we get to this paradox where the President claims total victory while independent actors declare a near-total collapse of implementation?  The easy response is to scream “it’s politics!!” Or better still, throw something or someone under the bus, like the economy or civil servants.

But the real, more damning indictment lies deeper.  It is reasonable to surmise that this administration is not a victim of a broken system; it has indirectly embraced a state of institutional and data chaos that provides a convenient shield from genuine accountability.  So, we are basically trying to track a ghost, using conflicting yardsticks which fuel deliberate confusion.

The engineering of this confusion rests on a triple-disconnect between wish lists, bloat and reality.  Here is how it works.   We have a manifesto of 245-259 promises.   Of course, for this regime, this wasn’t enough, so we apparently ended up with over 750 roadside declarations filtered down to 455 specific promises, suggesting over 200 promises on top of the manifesto itself.  That’s the wish list.  Then we have the Fourth Medium-Term Plan under Kenya Vision 2030 (MTP IV). 

This is the official government agenda, and it promises 1,522 outputs (completed activities and services delivered) and 305 higher-level outcomes, though not all of these are about welfare or wellbeing.  By the time we get to the budget, we are talking over 4,000 outputs and around 200 outcomes.  The picture is simple: we cannot draw a straight line from manifesto to plan to budget.

But here’s where the disconnect really matters, because promises, outputs and outcomes are just words.  Our hard-working Parliamentary Budget Office took the trouble to cost the 2022 manifesto at Sh2.97 trillion over five years in incremental new costs (mostly development).  For this “Ruto@4” scorecard, their four-year total was Sh2.09 trillion.  The manifesto then became BETA, which was then incorporated into MTP IV.  By the time MTP IV was done, the total five-year incremental cost estimate had risen to a mind-boggling Sh16.1 trillion, of which Sh13.2 trillion was the requirement for the first four years.  Suddenly, the wish list had become “the bloat”.

Just to be clear here, we are only talking about national government; counties have their own sorry tale of wish lists, bloat and reality.  Which brings us back to national government reality.  The rough estimate is that government has mobilised and allocated up to Sh2.7 trillion in development spending in these four years.  So, mathematically, the manifesto was more than fully funded, and, in a rational system, 455 pledges, or 245 promises, should have yielded hundreds of results, not just twelve (and no, we are not counting the number of houses – housing was 3-4 promises).

Where does the breakdown happen?  Well, manifestos are written to emphasise popular (even populist) pledges, while completely ignoring the legacy inheritance of, say, incomplete and ongoing projects (which are part of the MTP IV bloat) and pending bills (which must go into the budget).

Of course, neither manifesto nor plan takes into account the cost of our massive state overhead (recurrent costs), which the budget must, even as it factors in debt.  When we get to the budget, reality strikes.  Faced with underperforming tax revenues and debt service consuming half of these revenues, Treasury does what it does best: it starves the development budget.

In practice, this means the available Sh2.7 trillion is chopped up into little resource pieces and scattered across a chaotic mix of inherited legacy projects and new manifesto promises.  This administration’s value chain approach was a clever, innovative attempt to fix this anomaly, but the cash spreads too thinly, and not everything receives enough funding to cross the finish line.

But here’s the real problem.  This financial dilution creates the perfect bureaucratic hiding place – the "ongoing" classification.  In the world of government delivery units, a project where the Treasury spends a mere 1 per cent token disbursement to clear a pending bill is given the exact same status as a project that is 99 per cent physically complete.  Both are labelled "ongoing."

And this is where the trackers are forced into a corner.  Mzalendo correctly notes that nearly 150 promises are actively "ongoing" through legislative frameworks or initial executive orders. Yet, on the ground, Kenyans see empty spaces where market hubs or digital labs were promised. In this sense, "Ruto@4" tracking is illusory if it forces trackers to treat movement on paper as a substitute for delivery in real life.  And it confuses spending money with completing an action.

This failure is compounded because we lack a single source of truth for public data. We live in an institutional nightmare where no two government agencies can agree on the same basic numbers.

So, the CoB releases reports on actual cash exchequer issues, frequently revealing that development funds are locked up or diverted to recurrent expenses while Treasury focuses on budgetary commitments, painting a deceptively robust picture of funds absorption.

Then, even as KNBS presents our cold, clinical realities in hard economic data, we have some Government Delivery Services Unit, or the latest digital tracker from the Ministry of ICT, spitting out highly politicised metrics.  Meanwhile, the National Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation System (NIMES) - designed to track MTP progress systematically - is ignored by the political executive, who prefer to use ad-hoc figures prepared by speechwriters for public shindigs.

This data anarchy is not a failure of communication; it is a choice in which the leadership actively benefits from the statistical fog.  When there is no single version of the truth, leaders retain the political freedom to cherry-pick whichever report or unverified statistic makes them look best at a given moment, while burying inefficiency in the gaps between conflicting agency accounts. 

Until we find a way to align promises, plans and budgets in the exact same language, and work towards a single source and version of the truth, any scorecard you see is basically guesswork.

What Ruto@4 tells me is that our data anarchy is still an accountability shield.  So, as we call out this regime on its broken promises, so too must we for the chaotic system they chose to embrace.