The air in Addis Ababa must be very thin, because President William Ruto is up there breathing out pure fiction. While he stands before the African Union talking about “wholesome health reform” and “direct coverage,” the average Kenyan woman is currently staring at a hospital receptionist who is telling her the SHA system is down. It’s the classic Nairobi hustle: sell the sizzle in a 5-star hotel abroad while the steak back home has been stolen by the same people claiming to cook it.

He’s bragging about onboarding 50,000 vulnerable adolescent mothers onto a platform that, for most of us, is just a glorified “404 Error” page. It’s easy to promise “safe delivery and post-natal services” when you’re surrounded by Heads of State who won’t ask if the LINAC machines are actually working or if the nurses have been paid. In Ruto’s world, “restructuring health financing” is just a polite way of saying “we took the NHIF money you already paid and moved it into a new bucket that doesn’t have a bottom yet.”

Then there’s the talk of “domestic capacity” and 40% local procurement. We’ve seen this movie before, and it usually ends with a KEMSA-style plot twist where “local” means a briefcase company owned by a politician’s nephew. Strengthening supply security sounds noble until you realize it’s just setting the stage for the next big tender scandal. Why bother with global financing when you can create a local monopoly on syringes that may or may not ever reach those “26 high-burden counties”?

The most cynical part of the speech has to be the “Health Intelligence Platform.” The President wants “precise measurements” of who is dying, where, and why. Great. So instead of dying in the dark, Kenyan mothers will now have the privilege of being recorded in high-definition data points on a shiny new dashboard funded by “partners.” We don’t need more data to know that a woman dies when there’s no blood in the bank; we need the blood. But data sounds better in a pitch deck than actually fixing a broken supply chain.

This whole Addis performance is just another high-level PR stunt. It reminds me of the circus we saw during The Great Trek to Nowhere: Eric Omondi’s 486KM PR Stunt for a Dying Nation. Whether it’s a comedian walking to Mombasa or a President flying to Ethiopia, the goal is the same: look busy while the country bleeds. They promise “tangible results” to the AU, but to the woman in labor in a “last-mile facility,” the only thing tangible is the pain and the bill she can’t pay.

Ultimately, Ruto is moving from “broad estimates” to “precise measurements” of failure. Calling the SHA a success right now is like calling a house “renovated” while the roof is still on fire. We are being asked to applaud the blueprint of a hospital while standing in a graveyard. But hey, as long as the “Health Intelligence Platform” is digitized, I guess we can all watch the collapse in real-time on our smartphones. Welcome to the New Kenya, where the healthcare is “pre-paid” but the service is “never-found.”