The New Singapore. A Sh5 trillion leap. A generational fund. A grand pivot from survival to significance. And if you squint hard enough, you can almost see it: clean trains, disciplined budgets, world-class schools, hospitals that don’t send you home with a prescription and a prayer.
Kenyans, however, have heard this script before. Grand visions inviting significant investment, endless borrowing, and increases in taxes on the most basic goods and services.
Our doubt, we’re told, is pessimism, cynicism and the small-thinking mindset. This is the kind of language leaders use when they don’t want to answer questions, so they attack the people asking them those questions. President William Ruto has publicly framed critics as “high priests of eternal pessimism.”
Let’s clear the air: Kenyans are not cynical about progress. We are cynical about this class of progress salesman. The question Kenyans are asking is not complicated. It’s not even political. It’s pattern recognition.
You can’t, on the one hand, ask a country you have already financially exhausted to trust you with Sh5 trillion, and on the other hand act shocked that the public wants receipts. The proposed National Infrastructure Fund—designed to bankroll a “Singapore dream”— is now central to the administration’s pitch.
The People’s Audit documents that between 2014 and 2025, Kenya’s total public debt increased by Sh 9.65 trillion, to Sh12.05 trillion. A decade of borrowing that ballooned the debt stock by nearly ten trillion. So when Kenyans ask, “Where is the Singapore you built with the last ten trillion?”
They’re not being unserious. They’re being responsible adults. And this is the part the “cynicism” narrative wants to bury: debt is not just a number. Debt is a priority list.
And even the structure of borrowing tells you what kind of leadership you’ve had. The audit shows Kenya shifted from cheaper concessional loans to commercial Eurobonds and syndicated loans, often at 7–9 per cent interest, with shorter maturities and higher refinancing pressure. That’s not “development finance.” That’s expensive money taken fast—because fast money asks fewer questions.
Now bring it back to politics — because the regime would love for this to sound like an abstract history lesson. It is not.
President Ruto sat at the centre of government through the 2013–2022 era, and much of today’s leadership class is not some fresh team of technocrats parachuted into a broken system. It is the same ecosystem, the same networks, the same political culture that watched debt multiply while ordinary life became harder. The People’s Audit calls this period a decade of expansion without structural transformation.
So, again: where is the “Singapore” from that decade?
Forget Singapore. Did they build even a Cape Town—functioning commuter transport, reliable municipal services, clean procurement, visible consequences for theft—to earn the public’s trust?
Because that is what Kenyans are actually refusing: not the dream of a transformed Kenya, but the fantasy that a system that rewards impunity can be entrusted with a bigger pot of money and magically become virtuous.
This is why Deputy President Kithure Kindiki’s China comparison lands with a thud. He has argued that China’s turning point was 1978 and within 40 years it moved from poor and isolated to “first world,” and that Kenya can do the same in our lifetime.
Yes—China industrialised aggressively. Yes—China lifted hundreds of millions from poverty. But here is the part being politely left out: China treats corruption as a national security threat, not a PR inconvenience.
Their anti-corruption system routinely jails senior officials, and in some high-profile cases, courts have imposed death sentences for major bribery.
We appoint it. We defend it on TV. We weaponise tribes to protect it. Then we act offended when citizens say: “Not again. Not with five trillion.”
So when government communications tries to re-brand public caution as “cynicism,” what they’re really doing is demanding trust without integrity.
And that is the core contradiction of this “New Singapore” moment. Singapore did not become Singapore because it had a five-trillion plan. Singapore became Singapore because it had institutions that made theft a risky venture, incompetence expensive, and public service prestigious. A vision without enforcement is just a fundraising pitch.
If the National Infrastructure Fund is truly meant to be a clean vehicle, then let it be born in sunlight: full transparency, hard guardrails, Parliament’s real oversight, public participation that isn’t theatre, procurement that doesn’t feel like a family business, and consequences that don’t stop at junior officers.
Until then, the country’s skepticism is not cynicism. It is simply memory.
We don’t have a dream problem; we have a dreamer problem: leaders who discover the language of national destiny only when it’s time to raise money—then lose the plot the moment the money hits the coffers.
There isn’t a more urgent conversation Kenya can have than this: if you want to sell us “Singapore,” first show us you’ve built the one ingredient that makes Singapore possible — consequences.
