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A peculiar reflex in global development discourse: Whenever a leader in the developing world wants to signal ambition, competence, and modernity, they invoke Singapore. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and, more recently, Kenya’s President William Ruto have both held up the city-state as a model. In the run-up to the 2027 elections, Ruto has been telling Kenyans that he wants to transform the country into the “Singapore of Africa”. Singapore has thus become a kind of shorthand for the dream of rapid, state-led transformation. But what lies behind this obsession? Is it a serious policy blueprint, or simply a convenient slogan?
The fascination is continental. Kagame has called Singapore’s founding premier, Lee Kuan Yew, an inspiration, “a great man… who achieved great things with a small country”, and Rwanda is now routinely marketed as “the Singapore of Africa”. Ethiopia’s late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi built an entire ideology around the East Asian “developmental state”, and others have looked more loosely to the Asian Tigers as a template for leapfrogging the slow, contentious work of building democratic institutions.
The appeal is always the same: that a disciplined state, guided by capable technocrats and unburdened by messy pluralism, can compress decades of progress into a single generation. But the closer one looks at what the Singapore model demands, the more the dream complicates itself. Singapore’s story is indeed extraordinary. Expelled from Malaysia in 1965, it was a tiny island with no natural resources, high unemployment, and sharp ethnic tensions. Yet within a generation, it became one of the wealthiest nations on earth, with per capita GDP surpassing that of most of Western Europe. Lee Kuan Yew’s formula was as much about incentives as ideals: to blunt the temptations of graft, he paid senior civil servants and ministers salaries that were competitive with those of the private sector, recruited ruthlessly on merit, and pursued corruption without regard to rank. Corruption today is virtually non-existent.
What made this possible? In his paper “What is Governance?” Francis Fukuyama argues that government quality depends on the interaction of two dimensions: bureaucratic capacity and bureaucratic autonomy. Capacity refers to the resources and professionalization of a state’s institutions; autonomy denotes the insulation of the civil service from political micromanagement and patronage appointments. Neither dimension, on its own, is sufficient. Fukuyama explicitly places Singapore at the sweet spot of his governance matrix, combining high capacity with appropriate autonomy.
In contrast, Kenya occupies the opposite corner, characterized by low capacity and bureaucracies hollowed out by clientelism. Fukuyama adds a crucial insight: Singapore’s success rests as much on organizational culture as on formal rules. High-performing East Asian civil services are distinguished not only by correct procedures on paper, but by officials who have internalized professional norms. They are motivated, in his phrase, by social capital that promotes cooperative behaviour and substitutes for formal monitoring. Singapore built this culture deliberately, from the top down, over decades, not in a single electoral cycle.
The borrowing of models hasn’t stopped at the Strait of Malacca. On 8 July 2026, Ruto signed the Sovereign Wealth Fund Act into law, ring-fencing 30 per cent of future petroleum and mineral revenues for an intergenerational “Urithi Fund”, alongside a stabilization buffer and infrastructure funds. The inspiration this time is Scandinavian. “We have borrowed heavily from Norway’s model,” Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi declared, while the president pointed to Norway’s fund, which he valued at roughly KSh280 trillion, and promised that Kenya too could reach first-world status within a generation. In a single news cycle, the national aspiration migrated from Singapore to Norway. But the underlying pattern is identical, and it is the pattern this essay is about: Kenya’s leaders keep importing the institutional artefacts of high-trust societies while leaving behind the trust that makes those artefacts work.
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global is indeed the gold standard, but its mechanics repay close attention, because everything Kenya is skipping lives in the details. Norway struck North Sea oil in 1969 and waited two decades before legislating the fund in 1990; the first deposit arrived only in 1996 once the state had built the fiscal room to save. Parliament then bound itself with the handlingsregelen fiscal rule under which the government may spend only the fund’s expected real return, now set at roughly 3 per cent a year, and never exceed the principal. The fund invests exclusively outside Norway to shield the domestic economy from resource distortions and the domestic political class from temptation. It is managed by the central bank at arm’s length from ministers, screened by an independent ethics council, and is radically transparent: every holding in every company, in every country, is published for any citizen to inspect. Governments of the left and the right have honoured the rule, not because raiding the fund is impossible, but because in Norway, it is politically unthinkable.
That last clause is the crux, and it is where the Kenyan analogy collapses. Norway is among the highest-trust societies on earth: in successive World Values Surveys, a large majority of Norwegians say that most people can be trusted, and confidence in public institutions runs correspondingly deep. In their article, “All for All: Equality, Corruption, and Social Trust”, published in World Politics, Bo Rothstein and Eric Uslaner show how the various elements lock together in a self-reinforcing trap; where citizens perceive public institutions as corrupt and partial, it becomes rational to distrust both the state and one another, and why pay taxes honestly when no one else will? And that distrust in turn feeds the very corruption and inequality that produced it. Crucially, their lever is neither culture nor demography but institutional fairness: societies escape the trap when public institutions treat citizens impartially and universally, and governments, in short, build trust by being trustworthy.
In Kenya, interpersonal trust is thin, and institutional trust is thinner. Surveys repeatedly record deep public distrust of the police, the revenue authority, and the political class, and Transparency International ranks Kenya in the bottom third of its corruption index while Norway sits in the top handful. This gap is not incidental to the sovereign fund questions; it is the sovereign fund questions. A wealth fund is, at its bottom, a promise that the political class will sit beside an enormous pool of money for fifty years and not touch it. In a high-trust society, that promise is enforced by norms long before it is enforced by law – Fukuyama’s social capital gains doing the work that no statute can. In a low-trust society, the pool is not a patrimony; it is a target. The comparative evidence is unsentimental: sovereign wealth funds mirror the polities that create them. Norway became the world’s benchmark. Malaysia’s 1MDB collapsed into one of history’s largest kleptocracy scandals; Angola’s fund ended with the President’s son, who ran it, convicted of fraud. Kenya’s own ledger, Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, NYS, and the never-fully explained Eurobond proceeds suggest which lineage the country risks joining. Kenya’s proposal to save while drowning in debt whose servicing consumes the lion’s share of ordinary revenue, borrowing expensively to save it, and the Treasury’s dismissal of calls to first reach a budget surplus, inverts Norway’s sequence, which built the discipline before it built the fund. The new fund’s governance, moreover, will sit within reach of the same executive whose manifesto promised a state capture commission that has never materialized.
What Kenya can learn from Norway, then, is not the existence of a fund but everything around it: a binding withdrawal rule no government can quietly amend; transparency; managers that are genuinely insulated from political appointment; and hardest of all, the patience to earn credibility before money arrives. In the absence of these, an Urithi Fund does not protect wealth from politics. It delivers wealth to politics, gift-wrapped, for whoever controls the state when the minerals begin to flow.
And beyond the fiscal question, the Singapore being sold comes with a price its champions rarely name. The city-state is, in the language of political science, a dual state: it guarantees stable laws, open markets, and everyday normalcy for most of its citizens, while running a parallel sphere of coercion – a tightly managed press and a hemmed-in opposition beyond the reach of ordinary law in the service of social discipline and state-managed ethnic order. Its prosperity and its repression were not separate projects; they were built with the same hand. Before Kenyans ask whether they can become Singapore, they should ask whether they would accept the bargain that made it. The Singapore seduction stories promise that development must come first and democracy can wait. It has been used to justify the third term and constitutional rewrite from Kigali to Kampala, to shrink the civil space, and to recast dissent as an obstacle to progress. The graveyard of grand visions and master plans is crowded; the Singapore everyone cites remains conspicuously singular. The strongman rule has far too often produced neither prosperity nor accountability.
Even setting aside that bargain, the appeal for authority gets the problem backwards. As Fukuyama reminds us in his work on state building, the main obstacles to reaching what he calls “Denmark” – any well-governed, impersonally administered state – are not a lack of knowledge. Leaders across the developing world understand what good governance entails. The problem is political: there is too little local demand for reform and too many incentives to preserve the existing systems.
In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama names the pattern that runs through Kenya’s entire anti-corruption reform: the principal himself is the problem. Conventional anti-corruption models assume a well-meaning government trying to discipline wayward officials. But when political leaders use public office to reward their networks, as the Kenyan government has across successive administrations, the issue is not a few rogue bureaucrats. The rot begins at the top. This is why Kenya’s revolving door of anti-corruption agencies and initiatives has produced so little change. Research consistently shows that the specialized anti-corruption bodies are only as effective as the political will behind them; without it, they are short-lived and easily marginalized. Kenya has repeatedly demonstrated this pattern: the EACC issues reports, cases are filed, yet many of those implicated later reappear in new public appointments. This regime’s manifesto promised a state capture commission, but four years on, nothing has materialized.
Fukuyama, however, also outlines a potential roadmap, drawing on the example of the American Progressive Era. In the 1880s, the United States functioned as a full-blown patronage state, with public offices distributed as political rewards from the White House down to local postmasters. Reform materialized only when a broad coalition of progressive business leaders frustrated by the costs of corruption, urban activists, ordinary citizens, and reform-minded politicians, amassed enough political power to dismantle the spoils system and replace it with a merit-based civil service under the Pendleton Act of 1883.
Kenya has the ingredients for a similar coalition. The private sector understands better than anyone the costs corruption imposes on doing business. The Gen Z protests of 2024, the most significant civic mobilization in Kenya’s history, revealed a generation exhausted by a political class that treats public office as a private enterprise. Nor is that energy uniquely Kenyan. This is worth drawing not a tidy city-state administered from above, but a rising tide of citizens demanding accountability from below. What these movements have lacked is not numbers or courage but connective tissue, the alliance with business, professionals, and reform-minded insiders that turned American public anger into the Pendleton Act. Whether that energy consolidates into sustained, organized pressure, rather than dissipating between election cycles, is the open question: the Singapore Kenyans want, and the Norway they are now being promised will come from organized pressure below, or they will not come at all. Trust, like wealth, cannot be imported. Dream, delusion, or destiny: the difference will be won from below, not granted from above.
