So when Ruto and his supporters talk about “making Kenya a Singapore,” one must ask: Singapore of what? Singapore without manufacturing? Singapore without export competitiveness? Singapore without a clear public housing policy? Singapore without affordable healthcare? Singapore without disciplined budgeting? What Kenyans are being sold is not a vision, but a hallucination.

When Alice Ng’ang’a, a member of President William Ruto’s political cohort, stood before a public gathering and casually advised the President to sell all government parastatals in order to build roads, she did more than expose her own economic illiteracy. She revealed, in one reckless sentence, the poverty of ideas at the very heart of Kenya’s current leadership. It was a statement so alarming that it deserves to be preserved as a warning to future generations: this is how nations are talked into selling themselves.

Roads are not charity projects. Roads are not miracles. Roads are not built by selling national assets like a desperate family hawking furniture to pay rent. Roads are built through budgetary allocation, long-term planning, disciplined public finance, and accountable governance. Kenyans pay taxes, painful, punitive taxes, for this exact purpose: infrastructure, healthcare, education, and social protection. To suggest that the only way to build roads is to sell parastatals is to admit, openly, that the government has failed at its most basic responsibility.

And yet this dangerous thinking is now dressed up in shiny language. “Singapore.” A word President Ruto invokes with religious fervor, as if repetition alone can summon prosperity. But where, exactly, is this Singapore in Kenya’s budget? Where is it in the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework? Where is it in sectoral allocations, industrial policy, export strategy, education reform, public housing finance, or healthcare investment? Nowhere.

Singapore was not built on slogans. It was built on ruthless planning, institutional discipline, a competent civil service, industrial targeting, heavy investment in human capital, and zero tolerance for corruption. It did not sell its strategic assets to build roads. It used its state-owned enterprises to generate revenue, drive industrialization, and anchor national development. Temasek Holdings did not exist to be sold off. It existed to grow national wealth.

So when Ruto and his supporters talk about “making Kenya a Singapore,” one must ask: Singapore of what? Singapore without manufacturing? Singapore without export competitiveness? Singapore without public housing? Singapore without affordable healthcare? Singapore without disciplined budgeting? What Kenyans are being sold is not a vision, but a hallucination.

The most disturbing part is not the ignorance. It is the audacity. Leaders who cheerfully propose selling parastatals are not reformers; they are liquidators. They see the state not as a developmental engine but as a pawn shop. Kenya Railways, Kenya Power, National Oil, Safaricom stakes, ports, airports, these are not trinkets. They are strategic assets built over generations, often with public sacrifice. Selling them to cover routine expenditure like roads is economic vandalism.

If roads are not being built, the question is not “what should we sell?” The question is: where is the money going? Kenya collects trillions in taxes. Kenya borrows heavily every year. Debt servicing is choking the budget. Corruption scandals erupt with clockwork regularity. Procurement inefficiencies are legendary. Yet instead of confronting these structural failures, the leadership offers Kenyans a fantasy destination and asks them to pay the airfare with their inheritance.

And let us be brutally honest: this “Singapore mission” has become a convenient con. It allows leaders to avoid specifics. No timelines. No costings. No benchmarks. No accountability. Just endless speeches, foreign trips, photo-ops, and borrowed metaphors. Meanwhile, Kenyans are told to endure higher taxes, reduced services, and asset sales “for development.” Development funded by what, more borrowing? More taxation? Or more dispossession?

A serious government would present a blueprint. A real plan. With numbers. With trade-offs. With sector-by-sector priorities. With a clear answer to how development will be financed without strangling citizens or auctioning the future. What we have instead is improvisation masquerading as vision.

Those cheering this nonsense are not harmless supporters. They are accomplices in national self-harm. They insult the intelligence of Kenyans who understand that a country does not develop by selling itself piece by piece. They normalize incompetence by clapping for empty rhetoric. They shame leadership by lowering the bar to slogans and superstition.

Kenya does not need a Singapore myth. Kenya needs honest leadership, disciplined planning, and respect for public intelligence. Until that happens, every mention of “Singapore” from State House should be treated not as inspiration, but as a warning: when leaders run out of ideas, they start selling dreams, and sometimes, they sell the country with them.

Diaspora Times Editorial Board Disclaimer: This editorial represents the independent opinion of the Diaspora Times Editorial Board. It is intended to provoke public debate, demand accountability, and defend Kenya’s long-term economic interests and the interests of its people.