Kenyan president William Ruto thinks he has a 'fake news' problem - but it is really a chaotic trust crisis
Five days after youth-led protestors stormed Kenya's parliament building in June 2024, beleaguered Kenyan president William Ruto summoned three top journalists to his State House residence in Nairobi to tell his side of the story.
But what he expected to be a chance to speak to Kenyans turned into an opportunity to gauge his credibility.
"Are you aware, Your Excellency, for example, that a lot of Kenyans increasingly do not associate the truth with you?" Linus Kaikai, the editorial director of Citizen TV, fired asked.
When Ruto started to dismiss Kaikai's question as a personal "assessment", veteran editor and celebrity radio host Eric Latiff jumped in to tell Ruto that it was audience feedback.
"We asked people before we came here ... 'What question should we ask the president this evening?' And the one thing that many of them were saying is: 'When will he stop lying?"' said Latiff.
Looking for a quick foothold, the president said his promises to cut fertiliser prices and launch an affordable housing programme had been fulfilled.
"Whether you believe me or not, facts will not change. Facts are not changed by who says it. Facts are facts, and facts are very stubborn," the president said.
And there was the problem.
'Facts, context, nuance'
What the president forgot about the subsidised fertiliser programme - and what had infuriated many Kenyans about it - is that at the time he spoke, the then agriculture minister, Mithika Linturi, had just survived a parliamentary vote to sack him for giving farmers "fake fertiliser".
Ruto also omitted the controversy surrounding the unpopular affordable housing levy, which according to several polls was opposed by seven in 10 Kenyans.
In short, facts have context, nuance and credibility - they do not exist in isolation.
The president can tick the boxes that he set the ball rolling on those things. But what Kenyans saw were farmers in tears after being conned by their own government into buying sand disguised as fertiliser. They have also seen their salaried kin complain of tough times due to shrinking take-home pay caused by the housing levy and other unpopular taxes.
The president may try to take credit, but for the people on whose behalf these things have been done, they are terribly punitive policies. That's why their reality feels worlds apart from his.
'Trust deficit'
The president has also sent mixed messages.
First, he fired his cabinet on 11 July, At the time, he said he had done so "upon reflection, listening keenly to what the people of Kenya have said and after a holistic appraisal of the performance of [his] cabinet and its achievements and challenges".
Kenya watchers optimistically speculated that he had hit the reset button. But barely a month later, he reappointed half of the sacked ministers.
Second, in April 2023 Ruto had vowed that "there will be no handshake ... that brings the opposition and government into some conundrum, a mongrel, an outfit that is undemocratic, unconstitutional and illegal".
A handshake in the Kenyan context is a euphemism for truces and deals between erstwhile political foes.
It's a refrain that Ruto has used repeatedly, telling the opposition to wait for the next election in 2027 if they want to form a government.
But after the June 2024 protests, he coined the phrase "broad-based government" and raided the top echelons of the opposition party, the Orange Democratic Movement, for cabinet ministers. He appointed the party chairperson, two deputy party leaders and the leader of the minority party in parliament into his cabinet. ODM leader Raila Odinga even claimed that Ruto had "begged for his help" to steady his government.
As Kenya's most senior politician with immense power to set the tone, public confidence in his government wanes every time he goes back on his word.
Third, through innovative crowd-sourced citizen journalism, Kenyans are "fact-checking on the ground", pointing out stalled projects and broken promises by the Ruto administration.
Some projects have been "launched" many times, including those launched and completed by his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta.
This performance does not augur well for building public trust.
Disinformation problem, but context is king
In November 2024, Kenya's Catholic bishops spoke of a "culture of lies".
"Basically, it seems that the truth does not exist. If it does, it is only what the government says," the bishops said, indicting the political elite.
Several government agencies hit back, accusing the bishops of issuing "misleading, erroneous and false" claims. Ruto himself told the bishops to be "careful to be factual".
The constant is that Ruto earnestly believes he has a disinformation problem:
- In September, he blamed "fake news, misinformation and disinformation" for fuelling the youth-led protests.
- In November, in his state of the nation address, he complained that the digital era had made it "easier to misinform, mislead, disinform, incite and alarm the public".
- In December, he said he could "see clearly that a lot of what passes for fact are actually falsehoods, and that most opposition is based on inaccurate representations and sometimes outright disinformation".
But the president's assertions run into the problem of the reality.
For example, the president claimed that the Social Health Authority (SHA), a highly controversial new health insurer, was working, and that his housing project was on track to employ thousands.
First, yes, the health authority has been launched, but it is plagued by what the government has called "teething problems" leading to threats of strike action by the country's health workers. In response, the health ministry formed a committee to look into the challenges and propose solutions.
Second, when the president claimed that the housing project had created 164,000 new jobs, we struggled to find the data to support this that number. The national statistics agency showed that the construction sector, a proxy for the housing project, had created 45,500 jobs - 4,300 in the formal sector and 41,200 in the informal sector.
With cement production and consumption lower in 2024 than in 2022 and 2023, the numbers need a closer look. The president could have cleared up the resulting communications mess if he had provided a verifiable breakdown.
So what can Ruto do to win public trust?
One way is to improve his data game. It is good that the president is alive to the reality of an information disorder. But what he calls a disinformation problem is in many ways an information problem - for example, public data is all over the place.
An antidote is accessible, timely, relevant and accurate information. There are people who work in prebunking and debunking, and media and digital literacy.
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Letting professionals gather and share objective, verifiable data without all the political spin would be a good step. That way, he would not just share selective facts to sound good, or cause his handlers to hire an online army to take aim at critics. He could show with accurate data what he has done. It'll make him look credible and help him actually govern better.
Some analysts have asked the president to stop the public spectacle and deliver on his promises. Yes, he's ticked off some milestones: he's hired teachers, kept the shilling stable, slowed inflation, reduced prices of some essential goods, negotiated for jobs abroad and boosted agricultural productivity.
Go slow on the public spectacle
Kenyans can see these things, and delivering tangible results will quiet his critics. But instead of capitalising on such gains, the president has in recent months been bogged down by public spectacle in trying to defend his government, leading analysts to point this out.
A case in point was the public outcry in the final weeks of the year over the abduction of critics of his government. After initially dismissing this as 'fake news', he promised in December to put an end to the abductions. The saga is time that would have been better spent on telling the stories of his government's successes.
Leaders are ultimately accountable to the people. So constant criticism of Ruto's performance isn't "fake news," and concern about broken promises isn't just "negativity".
Kenyans aren't ignorant - they live in the real world. When they speak out online and offline, they're simply saying: "We deserve better!" If Ruto's claims don't match their reality, they won't believe him, they won't trust him, and they will continue to brand him a liar - fairly or not.
