Building Through the Storm: The Case for Staying the Infrastructure Course

Let me state my position plainly: times are hard, but it is not honest to pin that entirely on one man. This is not unique to Kenya. When global economic headwinds — inflation, currency pressure, the rising cost of living — sweep across nearly every developing economy at once, there is only so much any single government can control. The rest requires patience, and the discipline to keep building while the storm passes rather than abandoning the plan because the weather turned.

That is the case, as I see it, for keeping a visionary, infrastructure-focused president at the helm — and the case, specifically, for William Ruto.

The Record on the Ground

The numbers are not invented. By March 2026, the administration had built more than 2,669 kilometres of new tarmac road, alongside expanded railway cargo capacity, port operations, and aviation throughput — SGR and MGR cargo haulage has climbed past eight million metric tonnes, and Mombasa port container traffic has reached two million TEUs. Inflation, which stood at roughly 9.2 percent when Ruto took office, had fallen to about 4.1 percent by 2026, with the shilling stabilising near Sh129 to the dollar after a period of sharp depreciation. In March, Ruto signed into law a Sh5 trillion National Infrastructure Fund designed to mobilise domestic capital — pension funds, capital markets, monetised public assets — specifically to reduce Kenya's dependence on the kind of foreign borrowing that built the Standard Gauge Railway at a cost of roughly Sh903 billion in Chinese loans.

That is the logic behind the bet: infrastructure is not a vanity project. Roads move farm produce to market faster and cheaper. Ports and railways make Kenyan exports more competitive. Reliable power and water make a factory floor viable in a town that previously had neither. Every kilometre of tarmac is, in effect, an invitation to the kind of foreign investment that creates jobs beyond what any single government programme can manufacture on its own. If Kenya wants the foreign capital and manufacturing base that transformed the economies this series has already examined — South Korea, Singapore, Rwanda — infrastructure of exactly this kind is the non-negotiable foundation those countries built first, before anything else followed.

Why the Timeline Argument Matters

None of this delivers overnight, and that is precisely the point. A president is not handed a blank ledger; Ruto inherited an economy already carrying deep structural strain, and by his own account spent his early years in office simply stabilising it before the infrastructure push could accelerate. Judging a multi-decade national transformation by a single term's worth of completed kilometres is the same mistake this series has warned against throughout: expecting five years to deliver what history shows genuinely takes a generation. If South Korea and Singapore needed twenty-five to forty years of uninterrupted commitment to cross into the first world, it is worth asking whether Kenya's infrastructure programme deserves the time to mature rather than the reflexive verdict that hard times now mean the plan has failed.

Where the Argument Needs Honesty, Not Applause

A fair case has to hold its own weaknesses up to the light, not just its strengths.

The debt question is real. Kenya's public debt rose from roughly Sh9.15 trillion in December 2022 to about Sh12.3 trillion by December 2025 — a jump of over 34 percent in three years — and in the 2024/25 financial year, 71.2 percent of all government revenue went toward servicing that debt, leaving little room for the social programmes and capital projects citizens actually feel day to day. The new infrastructure fund is explicitly designed to reduce reliance on this kind of borrowing, but critics have already raised governance concerns, warning the fund could become vulnerable to corruption, legal battles, and election-season political capture rather than the clean financing vehicle it is advertised as.

Not every claimed figure holds up to scrutiny. Independent fact-checkers reviewing the administration's own "1000 Days" scorecard found they could not verify Ruto's claim of 1,800 kilometres of roads built, citing conflicting data — a reminder that a visionary agenda still has to be held to the same evidentiary standard as any other claim in this series, rather than accepted because it is inspiring.

Lived experience has not caught up to the macro numbers. Falling inflation and a stabler shilling are genuine achievements, but taxes remain high, food prices volatile, and disposable incomes squeezed for millions of households who do not experience "macroeconomic stability" as a line in a Treasury report. Infrastructure gains that show up in GDP statistics before they show up in a family's grocery budget will always be a hard sell politically, and that gap is not a public-relations problem to be managed away — it is a legitimate grievance that deserves acknowledgment, not dismissal.

The Standard, Applied Honestly

This series has argued from its first piece that Kenya deserves leadership judged on proven record rather than promise, on competence rather than affiliation, on patience rather than a five-year gamble. Infrastructure is one of the few areas where that proof is physically visible — a road is either built or it isn't, a railway either moves cargo or it doesn't. On that specific measure, the case for continuity is genuine and documented, not manufactured.

But the same standard that credits a president for kilometres of tarmac has to hold him accountable for kilometres of debt, and for the gap between a scorecard and a household budget. Whether Kenya is the country to keep this particular president depends less on whether the vision is real — the roads suggest it is — and more on whether the next chapter closes that debt gap and that lived-experience gap as convincingly as it has closed the tarmac gap. That is the fair test, and it is the one this administration, like any other, should be willing to be measured against.