Promises vs Power: How Ruto's rule has trampled on the law

President William Ruto flags off a Sh50 million last-mile electricity project targeting 384 households in Mwingi Central during his Ukambani tour. [Philip Muasya, Standard]

On September 13, 2022, William Ruto stood before a packed Kasarani Stadium and declared that Kenya was entering a new dawn. The rule of law, he thundered, would be the cornerstone of his administration.

He promised a country where courts would be respected, where the Constitution would be shielded from the whims of men, and where the era of impunity would finally come to an end. It was a speech built on the language of redemption, delivered by a man who had spent years casting himself as the victim of a system that weaponised the law against its critics.

Four years later, the record paints a strikingly different picture.

In October 2026, Justice Patricia Mande Nyaundi of the High Court delivered a ruling that cut to the heart of the contradiction. The court quashed President Ruto's directive to reserve 20 per cent of affordable housing units for teachers and police officers.

It was an announcement made from the podium, never debated in Parliament, never anchored in statute, and rolled out with the full weight of the presidency behind it.

"Executive authority may facilitate the implementation of the law, but it cannot alter the law or create rights and preferences outside it," Justice Nyaundi ruled, warning that allowing executive announcements to rewrite statutes would "undermine the rule of law."

It was a judicial rebuke that could have been written about the entire administration.

The housing directive is far from an isolated case. It is part of a pattern in which the Executive treats the Judiciary not as a co-equal branch but as an irritant to be managed, ignored, or publicly denigrated. The courts have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of a presidency that seems to view legal restraint as an inconvenience rather than a constitutional duty.

In June 2025, the President gazetted IEBC commissioners despite a High Court Conservatory order that explicitly blocked the process. The message was unmistakable. Court orders, when inconvenient, could simply be stepped over. Legal experts warned at the time that the move set a dangerous precedent, one that would encourage lower-ranking officials to treat judicial rulings as optional.

That defiance did not emerge from nowhere. In January 2024, Ruto openly vowed to disregard court rulings he deemed "corrupt," framing judicial independence as a nuisance rather than a constitutional safeguard. The statement drew condemnation from the Law Society of Kenya and from retired judges who warned that a President who picks and chooses which rulings to obey is no different from one who ignores the law entirely.

Then came January 2026. At the swearing-in of judges, an occasion traditionally reserved for affirming respect for the bench, the President used the platform to complain of "judicial overreach, or even, as some say, tyranny" when rulings went against him.

That a Head of State would accuse the courts of tyranny from a podium meant to honour them laid bare the Administration's underlying philosophy. The law, it seemed, is legitimate only when it favours the Executive.

The consequences of that philosophy have been written in blood.

The Human Rights Watch World Report 2026 documented 125 police killings in 2025, a 20 per cent increase, with 68 deaths recorded during the June and July protests. Among the victims were blogger Albert Ojwang, who died in police custody in June 2025, and street vendor Boniface Kariuki Mwangi, shot dead in circumstances that remain unexplained. Families of the victims have repeatedly complained of stalled investigations and a refusal by authorities to hold officers accountable.

These are not statistics. They are names, families, and futures extinguished under the watch of an administration that pledged to protect them. For the communities that buried their dead, the promise of 2022 rings hollow.

"Kenya has become a bedrock of extrajudicial killings and an abductors' playground," former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua declared in August 2026, in a scorching scorecard of his former running mate.

"Four years later, Mr William Ruto has betrayed the trust bestowed on him by the people of Kenya."

The charge is grave, and it comes not from the opposition benches but from a man who sat at the very heart of the Administration. Gachagua's break with the President has been bitter and public, but his words have found an audience among Kenyans who feel that the promises of the campaign have been abandoned in favour of raw power.

The pattern of executive overreach extends to the public purse. In January 2026, the High Court declared the appointment of 21 presidential advisers unconstitutional, a ruling that exposed Sh2.44 billion of taxpayer money spent on positions with no legal foundation.

It was, critics argued, a perfect metaphor. An Administration that believes its will is sufficient legal authority, and that Parliament, the courts, and the taxpayer are obstacles to be circumvented rather than partners to be respected.

The implications reach far beyond individual rulings. When a President publicly questions the legitimacy of courts, when orders are ignored, when critics are abducted and protesters shot, the constitutional order itself begins to erode. Not with a single blow, but with a thousand small defiances. Each one is dismissed as a minor matter. Together they form a pattern that threatens to undo the gains of the 2010 Constitution.

Lawyer Peter Wena put it bluntly in the wake of the housing ruling. "If you feel that this constitution is constraining you, resign as president."

It is a statement that captures the moment precisely. The Constitution of 2010 was designed to constrain executive power, to ensure that no President, however popular, could rule by decree. The men and women who drafted it had lived through decades of imperial presidency and were determined that Kenya would never return to that era.

The question Kenyans now face, as the 2027 elections approach, is whether that design will hold, or whether the rule of law will remain, in the words of its own President, a tyranny to be overcome.