Perils of empty promises amid unity forged by real hardships

President William Ruto can recite a polished speech. There is no doubt. He stands tall, the confidence unmistakable, the cameras fixed on him, the media primed, and headlines written before he utters the first sentence.

His State of the Nation Address on Thursday was no exception: smooth delivery, bold claims, eloquent phrasing, and a familiar attempt to bend national pain into a performance of progress. But outside Parliament’s manicured lawns, beyond the applauding insiders and choreographed theatrics, the real State of the Nation was playing out in silence: in dark kitchens, unpaid school fees, collapsing clinics, failing businesses and empty wallets. The truth is, Kenya is hurting. 

No government broadcast, no glossy speech, and no triumphant slogan can erase the lived experience of millions who have watched the cost of living rise faster than their hopes can keep up. While the country is fed a carefully curated story of recovery and transformation, the ground tells a different story. One of struggle, fatigue, and economic brutality.  Across the country, prices remain stubbornly high. Fuel continues to choke small businesses and households. Electricity bills feel designed not for service delivery but for punishment. Farmers, the backbone of the economy, are receiving the lowest returns in years even as middlemen and politically connected cartels profit handsomely. Youth unemployment remains a national crisis that no speech can sanitise.

Meanwhile, insecurity, which the President confidently declared under control, is creeping back into communities that once felt safe, from the North Rift to urban estates where theft and violent crime have resurfaced with worrying regularity. 

These are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a system cracking under the weight of corruption, incompetence and misaligned priorities. Kenyans are not exhausted because they lack discipline or effort. The socio-economic architecture is structured to work against them.

Every opportunity is cornered by connected individuals. Every public project is inflated to enrich a few. Every hardship is explained away through public relations instead of policy. The result is a country where citizens work hard but remain trapped in cycles of poverty created by those entrusted to break them.

And so on Thursday, as the President painted glowing pictures of progress, another Kenya, the real Kenya, continued its struggle largely unseen. In that Kenya, 13 million households made impossible choices: food or school fees, medicine or transport, rent or electricity. These are not abstract figures; they are lived punishments. They are what the State of the Nation actually looks like when stripped of PR and political poetry. 

There is a deeper insult embedded in this disconnect. When the President references “success,” he speaks of spaces like Runda, Kitisuru, Muthaiga and Kileleshwa, places insulated from inflation, shielded from insecurity, protected from the desperation of ordinary life. Yet he invokes the language of “hustlers,” claiming kinship with the very people whose struggles his policies worsen. The 30 million hustlers he speaks of are not living in those leafy suburbs. They are in Mathare, Mukuru, Kayole, Nyeri’s estates, Kisii’s outskirts, Kericho’s villages, Kakamega’s markets, Marsabit’s dusty towns, and every forgotten corner of the country where government presence is felt only during campaigns or taxation. 

The unity Kenyans feel today is not political unity, nor is it tribal unity, and certainly not inspired by leadership. It is unity forged by hardship. A shared suffering that has cut across class, tribe, region, and ideology. For the first time in decades, Kenyans are united by the lived experience of a government that has mastered the art of promising everything and delivering little. That unity is powerful, but also dangerous for any leadership that refuses to confront reality. 

Because leadership, at its core, demands truth. The real State of the Nation is documented in long queues at hospitals, in empty shelves in small kiosks, in overcrowded matatus, in the tears of parents unable to raise school fees, in young people surviving through hustles that barely earn dignity, let alone a living.

The President’s State of the Nation may have dominated Thursday’s news cycle. It may have flooded social media with graphics and hashtags. But by the following morning, every family woke wake up to the Kenya they know. Not the Kenya described in Parliament. And that contrast will be the loudest verdict of all.