Kenya’s public debt did not accumulate through misfortune; it was engineered

Somewhere in Mathare, a woman wakes before five in the morning to open a second-hand clothing stall she barely owns. Her eldest child dropped out of secondary school last year - school fees, then a hospital bill, then the quiet arithmetic of choosing which crisis to solve first. She pays her taxes. She has always paid her taxes.

What she has never been told, and what no government official has ever had the courtesy to explain, is that roughly three-quarters of every shilling she contributes goes to service a debt she never consented to, for projects she never saw, negotiated by people who have long moved the proceeds offshore.

This is the operating reality of the Kenyan state, and it has been for decades.

Kenya's public debt did not accumulate through misfortune. It was engineered. The Turkwell Hydroelectric Power Station, built in 1986 under Moi, cost nearly three times what credible estimates suggested, the kickbacks embedded in a rigged procurement process.

The Goldenberg Scandal of the 1990s drained over $1.5 billion (about Sh194 billion at the current rate) from the public purse through a scheme so brazen - subsidizing fictitious gold and diamond exports through regime-connected companies - that it read less like corruption and more like an open declaration that the state existed to serve its operators.

Both episodes left debt. Real debt, on the books, denominated in real currency, owed to real creditors. None of it built anything a Kenyan could point to.

The template did not change with the administrations. It refined itself. Under Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya's public debt tripled from Sh2.37 trillion inherited across 50 years of independence to Sh8.58 trillion in just eight years. Eurobonds totalling $7.1 billion were issued between 2014 and 2021.

Audits have since suggested up to Sh6.95 trillion in borrowings that do not trace cleanly through the public accounts.

The Standard Gauge Railway, with a price tag ballooning over $3.2 billion, has become a signature monument to the high cost of corruption in Kenyan infrastructure contracts. Under William Ruto, the borrowing continued past authorised limits by Sh2.25 trillion, pushing total debt beyond Sh13.1 trillion.

A forensic audit commissioned by civil society, reviewing over 50,000 documents spanning 1963 to 2025, found Sh6.8 to 6.9 trillion of borrowed money remain unaccounted for, fuelling arguments that this constitutes ‘odious debt’.

The legal doctrine of odious debt holds that obligations incurred without citizen consent, without public benefit, and with creditor awareness of the misuse are not legitimately binding on the people in whose name they were contracted.

The concept is not radical. It has been applied in post-colonial Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and post-Saddam Iraq. It is grounded in the logic that a government borrowing to loot is not acting on behalf of its population — it is acting against it. The citizens are not the beneficiaries of the loan. They are the collateral.

Kenya now has a petition that makes exactly this argument in court, and it deserves to be taken as seriously as anything on the political calendar.

On April 15 last year, Senator Okiya Omtatah Okoiti and eight co-petitioners filed High Court Petition E216 of 2025, naming Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Central Bank Governor, the Attorney-General, the Auditor-General, the IMF, and others as respondents. The petition invokes Articles 2(6) and 143(4) of the Constitution alongside the UN Convention Against Corruption.

It argues the debt of Sh13.1 trillion was procured outside of legal frameworks, without parliamentary approval and in excess of budget appropriations. Furthermore, it was done so to no demonstrable public benefit. It seeks declarations that this debt is odious and unenforceable. It seeks personal liability for the officials involved under Article 226(5). It seeks recovery from private accounts.

Last June, the CBK — not a body known for radical positions — backed the petition, affirming that it raised critical questions about illegal borrowing and calling for a multi-judge bench. The hearings are set to begin at the Milimani High Court this month.

This is not Omtatah filing another petition. This is the most structurally significant legal challenge to executive financial misconduct since the republic was founded, and it arrives at a moment when Kenyans have already demonstrated, through the Finance Bill protests of 2024, that they understand the connection between odious borrowing and their daily degradation. Those protests were visceral and spontaneous. This petition is methodical and constitutional. Together, they form the kind of dual pressure — streets and courts — that has historically moved immovable systems.

The argument for repudiation is not idealistic. It is practical. Seventy per cent of tax revenue servicing debt is fiscal paralysis. It means a government that collects money primarily to pay for its own past misconduct, with the remainder insufficient to run a functional state. It means that every new school not built, every medicine not procured, every road not maintained exists in the shadow of a loan that likely enriched someone who is not losing sleep over any of it.

The creditors who lent with eyes open to the misuse — and the international financial institutions whose structural adjustment conditions have consistently deepened the trap rather than resolved it — are not innocent parties waiting to be protected. They are respondents. And they should be treated as such. They knew this money was lent unconstitutionally, they knew it would be stolen, yet they lent it anyway.

The hearings begin this month. Every Kenyan who has ever balanced a household budget against a tax burden that keeps rising while services keep declining has a stake in what happens in that courtroom. Attend if you can. Demand that civil society groups you support make this a priority. Insist that your elected representatives stop treating debt audits as technical exercises but as the accountability instruments that the Constitution intended them to be.

The woman in Mathare did not take this loan. Neither did her children. The least this republic owes all of us is the honesty to say so, and a court willing to act on it.

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The writer is an active citizen and owner of a tech start-up. lewisngunyi10@ gmail.com