Better to die in debt than in poverty: Ruto's proverb just found its billion-dollar proof

 "Thou oughtest to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury." Matthew 25:27, KJV.

What if the man everyone is mocking for owing $1.2 billion (Sh156 billion) is actually following the one rule most of his critics never finished reading?

Fire cooks your dinner and burns your house down. The same flame, different hand holding it. Robert Kiyosaki has spent three decades treating debt as fire he chose on purpose, tied to something built to pay for itself. Before the jokes land, a quieter question deserves the floor: did anyone reacting to this headline actually reread the book they are quoting at him?

This is not a defence of Kiyosaki. It defends an idea we keep repeating without checking.

This week's signal

Here is the debt everyone misread: Kiyosaki has spent this year confirming he owes $1.2 billion, tied to roughly 1,500 apartment units held with real estate partners. His former wife, Kim Kiyosaki, told Vanity Fair the figure reflects shared, partner-level exposure, not a personal bill.

Working from his reported income, Vanity Fair placed his own share closer to $30 to $60 million. Kiyosaki's answer has stayed consistent: the debt sits against income-producing property, and if it collapses, the bank inherits the problem, not him.

Here is what the outrage keeps skipping. “Rich Dad Poor Dad” never said debt was bad. It said stop confusing assets with liabilities. Kiyosaki's own definition was blunt: an asset puts money in your pocket; a liability takes money out. The instruction was never "avoid debt"; it was "know which side of that line you're standing on before you sign."

Judged that way, $1.2 billion against cash-flowing apartments is not a contradiction of the book. It may be its purest expression: borrowed money buying an asset built to service its own debt. A $40,000 (Sh520,000) car loan, by contrast, fails that same test every month, since nothing about the car pays the note back. Same word, debt, covering two completely different behaviours.

President Ruto made a related argument in 2023, recalling his years as MP for Eldoret North, where he found constituents "risk-averse and debt-averse." He offered a Kalenjin proverb instead: better to die of debt than to die of poverty, since poverty's ending was never in doubt anyway.

Neither man was licensing recklessness. Both were rejecting paralysis dressed up as prudence.

What it means for business

There is a quiet pattern in how money moves. Ordinary savers mostly hold positive balances and call that safety. The largest holders of wealth usually run negative ones, debt dwarfing anything in savings, because selling an appreciating asset triggers tax while borrowing against it doesn't.

A loan against income-producing property is a bet on the future.

A loan against optimism alone, like that car, is a bet against yourself. Foresight leadership means testing which one you're signing before the bank does.

What it means for policy

This is Kenya's own argument, made by its president: nations too debt-averse often stay too poor to escape poverty on schedule.

The honest question was never how much debt is too much, but whether every shilling borrowed finances something that will out-earn its cost. Debt aversion dressed as prudence has buried more national ambition than debt itself ever has.

What it means for people

For the ordinary reader, the lesson isn't to go borrow a billion. It's simpler and less forgiving: before you borrow anything, ask whether the thing you're buying will pay for itself, or whether you will. Kiyosaki's apartments answer that question one way. Most consumer debt answers it the other. Charlie Munger liked to repeat a line that captures this book's real discipline: the young man knows the rules; the old man knows the exceptions. Most reacting to this headline know neither; they just know the number is scary.

Afterthought

Every generation needs one uncomfortable idea to test its assumptions, and this week's is this: the opposite of debt was never safety; it was the asset test nobody bothered to run before reacting. Fire still punishes the careless as it always has, billion-dollar confidence included.

The wisdom was never avoiding the flame. It was knowing what you were building before you struck the match.

Ask yourself this week which fear is actually running your decisions: the debt you can see, or the poverty of not knowing which side of your own balance sheet you're standing on.

A controlled flame builds. An uncontrolled one burns you down. Debt never announces which one you’re holding. "Decisions are made on the radar screen, but the future is yours."

 -The author is a human-centred strategist and leadership columnist