Project launch and relaunch frenzy is a distraction

President William Ruto unveiled the Iriari and Kanyuambora irrigation projects. [PCS]

Monday, September 2 represents 720 days since President William Ruto’s inauguration as President and 755 days since the August 2022 general election. With another 1,072 days to go to the next election in August 2027, the good news is he still has 60 per cent of his term remaining to deliver the 200 Kenya Kwanza promises to Kenyans. Plenty of time left, right?

Let’s peek at the President’s timesheet so far. Responses to protests in 2023 and 2024 have probably taken up at least 10 per cent of the time, another 10 per cent was spent blaming the Jubilee regime, 40 per cent went to foreign travel with the final 40 per cent devoted to development tours to bombard Kenyans with at least 200 new promises from car sunroofs.

Kenya Kwanza is a case study on how our traditional political-business cycle is reframed, which is why I like to view their five-year term as three 18-month semesters with a six-month campaign period at the end. The first September 2022-March 2024 semester showed mixed results. Our debt crisis was postponed, but disappointingly, they never actually got their policy agenda going due to court challenges, inexperience, bad behaviour or incompetence. Most telling was they only published this agenda as official government policy at the end of this semester, setting out their course work at the end, not the start, of the course.

So when their second semester to September 2025 began, one hoped for a renewed and refreshed focus, away from the field, and back working at the office. Basically from jamboree to job. It didn’t quite happen, and those Finance Bill protests in June were the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s when the trust deficit between Ruto and the people most clearly manifested.

For the record, a successful second semester is one in which real progress is made – the seeds of policy innovation with public buy-in having been planted during the first semester of shared economic recovery. Then the third semester to March 2027 would consolidate initial gains – because the Bottom Up Economic Transformation Agenda is a long game – into a solid foundation for the future. Today looks like we are on first semester work in the second.

Yet we have a second-semester surprise in a broad-based government ostensibly established in response to the youth-led protests, but essentially an existential circling of the wagons by the shell-shocked, yet survivalist, political class. Suddenly, 2027 doesn’t look so far away after all!

Going by the past week, we are now in a parallel universe of politics and projects. On one side, the President and his administration are rolling around the country doing development tours and launching multiple development projects while guesting at homecoming functions in a supposed official era of fiscal austerity. Hell, celebrate the next Cabinet meeting in your village, but don’t complain about the Finance Bill that comes after that to raise the taxes to cover those costs!

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In this universe, broad-based government is a call for unity, which could be anything from openly shared and common interests in Kenya as a national idea, to monolithic Kanu-style “group-think”. Like the mantra that prosecuted the war on Iraq, “if you are not with us, you are against us”.

The other universe is still defining itself. The recent Gen Z moment offers important context. Within this universe, the most prominent rollout we are seeing is the “De-launch” agenda. For every project launched in the first universe, this parallel one informs us that the project didn’t quite launch, or if it did, this isn’t the first, or second, or third, launch. In this sense, the de-launch is a two-part play. The first is to confirm nothing after launch. The second is to stop relaunches.

Of course, we need to view and understand this relaunch agenda with a transparency and accountability lens. That’s why the broad-based first universe is having so much trouble with it.

This is all great entertainment, especially with “town halls” in the first universe versus the “talk shows” in the second. Is it also a distraction? Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Don’t forget that it is easier to sell, or debunk, visible projects to the public than it is with invisible policies and programmes. As someone once said, “bidhaa” (product) always beats “sera” (policy).

What is the distraction? The simplistic view is we are distracted by this entertainment from our daily issues of concern like cost of living, jobs and incomes and even debt, taxes and corruption. Good distractions happen in plain sight: we cool down by talking about this stuff without fixing it. Kenya Kwanza is then happy to ditch its 2nd and 3rd-semester coursework and focus on 2027.

The real distraction here is that both sides benefit from our weak formal institutions. In the first universe, they are basically ignored in the style of French King Louis IV’s legend of “l’etat, c’est moi” (“the state, is I/me). In the second, these formal institutions, having failed, are the subject of public vilification. For both, our institutions as rules are informal.

Here’s an example of how we apply this distraction. As we begin to internalize the 2024/25 budget, the 2025/26 budget process starts quietly next week (September 9). Remember, we are getting 2024/25 off the ground while the 2023 Finance Act sits in the Supreme Court, and proposals are crafted to re-introduce the substance of the withdrawn Finance Bill 2024 in a different form. If this country worked properly, we should already have audited government financial statements for 2023/24.

In other words, if our institutions worked, then at any one time, Kenyans should be able to engage with the government on the implementation of the current (2024/25) budget, accountability around the previous (2023/24) budget, and decisions on the coming (2025/26) budget.

In places where this works, I have seen them call it the 3-in-1 budget cycle. Think about this engagement in the context of all of these project launches, relaunches and de-launches. We can’t because the only thing we are following is the actual launches, relaunches and de-launches.

Yet, in a 3-in-1 budget cycle, we could probably ignore the wasteful publicity and noise in project launches and relaunches in our first universe, while our second universe might offer more proactive (pre-feasibility/concept, pre-launch) than reactive (de-launch) engagement.

We will return to the 2025/26 budget launch as a formal institutional process next week, but right now, this parallel universe in which we currently reside feels pretty much like “The Matrix”. I suspect that the broad-based government formerly known as Kenya Kwanza prefers it this way.