Ruto government has failed because they believe in propaganda above everything else and they also fell for theory economics
Fatal mistake number three which this Ruto regime can never recover from is overestimating the power of propaganda.
Propaganda, if one is not careful, can easily be like the cocaine drug. You can get high on it and start assuming that it is still working to fool the public even when it has long stopped working.
The latest propaganda narrative is best illustrated in the following recent newspaper headline; Ruto hard choices finally beginning to pay off and the economy is now recovering.
Anybody living in Kenya will know that that is a joke, albeit a joke in bad taste with all the economic hardships and suffering ongoing in the country.
Any suggestion that the economy is recovering, has to be a mirage and an illusion. And as we all know cocaine tends to give you an illusion. And this is precisely what is happening with the propaganda which is still littering our media all over the place.
There is too much propaganda in Kenya and there is no way you can run a government on propaganda. It is also interesting to take note of the fact that that narrative is pegged on the mysterious strengthening of the Kenyan Shilling. Which to put it simply, is just “stage managed” and you know with things which have been stage managed if something small goes wrong the Kenya Shilling will fall like a stone.
In any case stage managed things are not sustainable and they have never been.
The other factor this false narrative is based on is the falling prices of fuel in the country. Although prices have still not reached where the fourth president left them, they're indeed going down. Which is good but not good enough to support a narrative that the economy is improving.
Fatal Ruto mistake number four:
Ignoring the cost of living
Those of us who were around and grown-ups when Mwai Kibaki came into Power will remember that what happened immediately is that the cost of living went down.
For example I vividly remember a campaign by the Coca-Cola Company where they reduced their prices to only 15 Shillings (from Kshs 25) for a 300ml bottle of Coca-Cola. And the headline on the posters was; Hope is in the air.
But there's something else that Kibaki did that dramatically brought the cost of living down and that was the introduction of free primary school education.
After that weekend when Kibaki was sworn in as Kenya’s third President, the following Monday millions of kids reported to school. Primary schools were swamped with kids who had been at home some of them for lack of fees.
Of all the achievements of Kibaki this one impacted Kenyans the most. Upto this very day there are people today who would never have been what they are had it not been for that Kibaki move.
But staying on point, it dramatically brought the cost of living down.
Well, with Ruto cost of living was not important. Indeed he told us that his government would focus on production and then finally one day in the future, prices and the cost of living would come down.
That policy ended up being a disaster so much so that the government today has changed tact and has been actively working towards bringing down the cost of living by intervening (which they swore they would never do).
I believe we can all agree that the cost of living issue is a blunder that this Administration can never come back from. Simply because when you touch people's pockets they tend not to forget quickly. They are bound to wait for you at the next general election with only vengeance in their hearts and minds.
Fatal Ruto error number five;
Being seduced by Ndii theoretical economics
There is a huge difference between theory and the practical reality on the ground. That is why your favorite lecturer for your MBA degree does not own a string of businesses and is not a successful entrepreneur. Simply because they deal with theories and you're supposed to learn these theories and then go to the ground and not only implement them but adjust them according to the realities on the ground.
Theory and reality are very different things and this is what the Ruto Administration never understood, with very dire consequences on the country.
Economist David Ndii, who is the chief presidential economic advisor, really impressed us all on social media before 2022. Mostly with his grand theories which we all greatly admired. However his theoretical policies have now fallen flat on their face against the reality that is Kenya today.
Now please allow me to shock you.
In America there was a president who was a cripple and paralyzed from the waist down and he came into office in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Roosevelt was a very smart guy and he had no illusions about what the situation was in his country as he came into office with well over 13 million jobless Americans and almost all banks closed.
And he hired some very smart people (NOT one person, like Ruto did, but a group of people).
Now we all know, even those of us who are not economists, that carelessly printing money is bad for an economy. It messes up an economy right? But the way Roosevelt revived the American economy was by printing a lot of money. This is the president who first abandoned the gold standard.
The gold standard means that you only print money backed by gold that you hold in your reserves. And of course there was no way you would have been able to print money without abandoning the gold reserve.
And it worked like a charm for President Roosevelt and the American economy dramatically recovered from the Great Depression.
Now it is important to note that what Rosevelt did was just to postpone the problem because today economies are suffering because the world abandoned the gold standard. Anyway here we're talking politics and the truth is that Roosevelt knew that he had a very short time to work some magic and get the economy to recover otherwise he was going to find himself out of office super-fast.
As damaging as it proved to be to future generations, he just had to do it.
You know power is very sweet and once you' have gotten that power, even if somebody comes and tells you to sell your mother most people would do so without thinking twice. That’s human nature for you.
Still, my main intention here was to prove to you that theory and practical are two very different things.
The Ruto administration did not remember this and fell for Cinderella-nice-sounding economic theories and we are paying a very high price for that to this day.
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