When Kenya announced that it had imported a case of Ebola last week, the announcement was met with public cynicism that has manifested a lot over the last couple of years. All manner of conspiracy theories emerged, ranging from claims of lockdowns to the government profiting from a health crisis.
In simple terms, Kenyans have developed cynicism that makes them distrust the government and its institutions. Over the last couple of years, the trust deficit has been pronounced on almost every topic.
However, trust is often discussed as though it were a popularity contest: whether citizens approve of the President, believe the opposition, or trust the government of the day. But public trust is more complicated than that.
A person can distrust a political leader while trusting the courts, support a public institution while criticising its performance, or accept the need for a major investment while questioning how it was approved.
For The Chronicle Weekly, trust has five connected layers: institutional, political, procedural, economic, and social. This editorial framework, rather than a published index, is designed to distinguish the different ways confidence can be gained, lost, and tested.
Institutional Trust: Do The Systems Work?
Institutional trust is confidence that bodies such as Parliament, the courts, the police, the electoral commission and county governments will carry out their responsibilities consistently and fairly.
It is not simply whether citizens like the people running those institutions; it is whether they believe the institution will follow its mandate even when the decision is unpopular or politically inconvenient.
Afrobarometer’s 2024 survey of 2,400 Kenyan adults, conducted between April 10 and May 3 and published in 2025, found that 50 per cent trusted the courts, 45 per cent the President, 44 per cent Parliament, and 36 per cent each the police and IEBC, either “somewhat” or “a lot”.
By contrast, 70 per cent expressed trust in religious leaders and 67 per cent in the Kenya Defence Forces. The figures suggest that confidence varies considerably across institutions, rather than collapsing uniformly across public life.
Political trust: Do Leaders Deserve The Authority They Seek?
Political trust concerns whether citizens believe leaders and parties will use power responsibly, keep commitments and make decisions in the public interest.
It closely relates to institutional trust, but the two are not interchangeable: voters may lose confidence in an incumbent without believing the opposition would govern more effectively.
That distinction matters as Kenya approaches the 2027 General Election. Opposition unity, for example, may show an ability to coordinate politically, but it does not, by itself, establish agreement on taxation, public debt, devolution, healthcare, or the distribution of power within a future administration.
A coalition must be judged not only by whom it opposes, but also by the commitments it makes and the mechanisms through which it proposes to honour them.
Procedural Trust: Were The Rules Followed?
Procedural trust is confidence in how a decision is reached, including whether the process is transparent, lawful, inclusive and open to scrutiny.
Citizens may support a project’s stated objectives while questioning whether they consulted affected communities, disclosed relevant information, or gave competing interests fair consideration.
This matters especially for large infrastructure and investment projects. The proposed Dangote refinery in Lamu, for example, has faced a legal challenge raising questions about transparency and disclosure.
A challenge does not prove the allegations are correct, but it shows why the process’s credibility matters as much as the investment’s promise.
Economic Trust: Can Citizens Believe The Numbers?
Economic trust is confidence that public financial claims, budget figures, investment proposals and promises about the future are credible enough to guide decisions.
It matters when government asks citizens to accept new taxes, investors to commit capital, or the public to support a financing model whose costs and benefits may unfold over many years.
Kenya’s National Infrastructure Fund makes this question especially relevant.
The fund’s stated purpose is to mobilise financing for commercially viable infrastructure, but the public needs clear information about the assets it will support, the risks it will assume, the returns it expects and the consequences if projects underperform.
The model’s credibility depends not only on its stated ambition but on whether its financial structure and results can be independently scrutinised.
Social Trust: Can People Rely On One Another?
Social trust concerns confidence in other people: whether neighbours, colleagues, businesses, and community members can generally be relied on to act honestly and honour their obligations.
It differs from trust in the state and should not be inferred solely from institutional-trust figures.
The question is whether Kenyans increasingly rely on personal networks, chamas, SACCOs, family connections, and informal recommendations to manage transactions they do not feel comfortable entrusting to formal systems.
That proposition needs evidence from interpersonal-trust surveys and research into household financial behaviour; you cannot establish it simply by pointing to low confidence in government.
Why The Distinctions Matter
These five layers overlap, but they are not substitutes for one another.
A government cannot repair procedural failures with a communications campaign, and a popular leader cannot guarantee that an institution will be impartial.
Low trust also does not automatically prove that a service has failed: perceptions and measurable performance must be examined separately.
Therefore, measuring trust is not meant to produce a single national score or rank institutions from best to worst.
It aims to identify where confidence is weak, test whether that weakness is linked to identifiable barriers or failures, and establish what evidence would show improvement.
For Kenya, the central question is not simply whether citizens trust their leaders.
It is whether the systems through which decisions are made, money is spent, disputes are resolved, and promises are delivered give citizens sufficient reason to trust the next decision.
