Download, Read and Share: The Chronicle Weekly October 12, 2026
Kenya is not short of ambition.
In the past fortnight, it broke ground on a refinery in Lamu, put Sh340 billion of public seed capital to work in a new infrastructure fund, and saw the Cabinet approve $350 million for Kenya Airways and the settlement of 28,726 pending bills.
Each is a decision about the future. Each also asks citizens to believe something they cannot yet check: that the money will be spent as promised, that the risks have been priced, that an agreement nobody has published is fair.
That is the question this issue follows. We call it the trust chain: how power is won and counted, how money is borrowed and spent, how disputes are settled, how information travels, and how ordinary people cope when none of it feels dependable.
Our argument is that distrust is not only a mood. It is a cost paid in delay, in terms the public cannot see, and in workarounds that serve the connected and leave everyone else out.
We tried to apply one test to everyone: can the public check what it is being asked to believe? We applied it to the government and the opposition, the courts, the media, and, in our pages on Chamas and WhatsApp groups, citizens themselves.
It did not always give us the answer we expected. The courts are clearing more cases than they receive. The SGR was delivered at its headline cost.
Trust in the ruling party recovered between 2021 and 2024. We have said so each time, because a case that collects only favourable evidence is a campaign, not journalism.
We have also tried to be plain about what we do not know. The Afrobarometer series we lean on ends in 2024. “Ni ukweli?” is our shorthand for a daily habit, not a survey finding.
And this Wednesday’s hearing in Malindi will not decide who owns the land at Lamu; we have not pretended otherwise.
Read the issue as you would want to be read: with the numbers on the table and the doubts left in.
How to check us. Illustrations in this issue are AI-generated, as the disclaimer on page 3 says. Every survey figure carries its source, and where two surveys measure different things, we have not ranked one against the other.
Where we could not find a number, we say so rather than infer it.
If something here does not hold up, write to editor@thechronicle.co.ke, and we will correct it in the open.
An issue of The Chronicle Weekly about trust should be easy to check.
