One year after the much-publicised “broad-based government” between William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, the official scorecard reads like a glossy brochure rather than an honest audit.
I have just reviewed the 20-page “popular version” of the COIN-10 one-year progress report on the UDA–ODM Memorandum of Understanding. The highlights are predictable: the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has been reconstituted, reform laws have been passed, the government claims that the Social Health Authority has expanded coverage from seven million to 30 million Kenyans, and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has recovered nearly Sh9.8 billion.
On paper, it all sounds impressive.
But paper, as Kenyans have learned, is a forgiving medium.
The report also boasts of Sh415 billion in county funding, more than 820,000 youth supported through the NYOTA programme, and 840,000 jobs allegedly created through housing and climate programmes. It further cites an improved credit rating by Moody's, the appointment of 31 judges to ease court backlogs, and a commitment to reduce foreign borrowing while boosting local production.
If these numbers were to be believed without question, Kenya would be in the middle of a quiet economic renaissance.
Yet outside the neat bullet points, the lived reality of Kenyans tells a very different story.
Healthcare reforms remain chaotic despite the transition to the Social Health Authority. County governments continue to complain about delayed disbursements. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high. And the cost of living still weighs heavily on ordinary households.
This gap between official narrative and lived reality is precisely why the report feels less like a progress review and more like political theatre.
The “broad-based government” was sold to Kenyans as a moment of national unity — a rare consensus between rivals meant to stabilise politics and accelerate reforms. In practice, it has often looked like elite accommodation, where political heavyweights share space while the public watches from the sidelines.
Even the political reforms that were supposed to symbolise this new era remain stalled. The proposal to establish the office of the Leader of the Official Opposition — once touted as a major structural reform — is still stuck in Parliament.
That delay is not accidental. It reflects the deeper truth behind the arrangement: the broad-based government was never primarily about restructuring Kenya’s politics. It was about managing it.
Kenyan politics has long been defined by deals among elites, often packaged as national solutions. The UDA–ODM agreement fits neatly into that tradition. It calmed tensions, yes. But calming tensions is not the same as transforming governance.
What the COIN-10 report attempts to do is convert this political détente into a narrative of sweeping progress. The numbers are rounded, the achievements carefully curated, and the inconvenient questions quietly ignored.
It reads less like a national report and more like a public relations document.
This is not to say that nothing has been achieved. Reconstituting the electoral commission is an important institutional step. Judicial appointments do help address case backlogs. And any recovery of public funds by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission is welcome.
But governance is not measured by isolated milestones. It is measured by trust, transparency and tangible change in people’s lives.
On those fronts, the scorecard remains murky.
When a government claims hundreds of thousands of jobs while young graduates roam the streets searching for work, the statistics invite skepticism. When healthcare reforms promise universal coverage while hospitals struggle with implementation, the claims sound premature.
Kenya’s citizens are not allergic to progress reports. What they resist is political storytelling disguised as accountability.
The danger of exaggerated scorecards is that they slowly erode public confidence. When people repeatedly see official success narratives that clash with their daily experiences, they begin to assume that all reports are fiction.
And once public trust collapses, even genuine reforms struggle to gain credibility.
In the annals of presidential committees, the COIN-10 exercise risks joining a long list of commissions whose reports made headlines but left little lasting impact. Its attempt to package a political arrangement as a national transformation may ultimately backfire.
If anything, the document highlights the need for a deeper conversation about Kenya’s governance culture — one that moves beyond elite agreements and focuses on measurable public outcomes.
For now, however, the so-called progress report feels like a performance.
Perhaps that is why some observers have already given the committee a nickname — one that captures the theatrical nature of the exercise.
In the colourful language of Kenyan politics, it may well go down in history as the “Kalongo-Longo Committee.”
Arnold Maliba is a Governance expert
