The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) headquarters in Nairobi.
I recently attended the Debt Conference and left infuriated, and I’d be remiss to not spread that rage, because you need to feel it too.
We are 50 million people, 47 counties, dozens of languages and faiths—an orchestra of difference.
Yet on one thing, almost everyone agrees: this debt squeeze was not inevitable. It was drawn. Costed. Signed. Poured in concrete.
Somebody drafted the plans. Somebody approved the change orders. And today, somebody is still collecting rent from a house built on our backs.
The numbers don’t lie—politicians do. More than half of every shilling the government collects disappears into debt service before a teacher marks a register, before a nurse opens a box of gloves, before your local clinic can fix a leaking roof.
What’s left is swept into “development,” which then vanishes into that Bermuda Triangle called pending bills.
Small businesses drown while the State lectures them about resilience.
Your mama mboga extends credit to the neighbourhood while the government pays the rich on time and tells you to be patient with “the economy”.
How did we slide here? By smashing constitutional guardrails, normalising emergency powers, and turning Parliament into a vending machine. Supplementary budgets—designed for unexpected crises—became a lifestyle.
Overstated revenue projections sold fairy tales that justified more borrowing. Then came the sleight of hand: the debt anchor (55 per cent of GDP according the Public Finance Act) morphed into a nominal debt ceiling, a polite rebrand that helped our obligations climb to roughly 68 per cent of GDP. Oversight didn’t fail; it was shoved aside.
The crisis is not abstract; it lives in your shopping basket. VAT on fuel. New mandatory levies on salaries whether or not your fridge has food. eCitizen convenience fees that feel like a tollbooth between you and your rights.
Billions ringfenced “for housing” idling in Treasury Bills because the State prefers to lend to itself while you wait for dreams that never break ground. When a government taxes consumption first and wages hardest, that’s not shared sacrifice. That’s punching down.
Follow the money upstream. Domestic borrowing pays out rich interest to the usual club: commercial banks, pension funds, insurers—entities tied by ownership webs that often loop back to the same political power brokers who shape debt policy.
The poor pay through taxes and higher prices; the well-connected earn interest from lending to a State they influence. Debt becomes a conveyor belt. A bottom-up model, but for moving cash from the bottom, to the up.
State corporations have also become political ATMs. Losses stack, guarantees balloon and when the roof finally caves in, the solution sold to you is “privatisation”—a clearance sale for insiders to scoop public assets at a discount after helping to wreck them.
Then there’s the payroll theatre. The public service employs a small fraction of Kenyans yet swallows an outsized share of revenue—thanks to salaries topped with a confetti storm of allowances.
We have 247 of them. Responsibility allowance—because public servants are employed to be irresponsible, unless otherwise incentivised not to. Sitting allowance—because lawmakers are employed to skip work unless paid an allowance for ... doing the job they get a salary for.
It’s madness. You wouldn’t run your own business this way. And you damn well shouldn’t let them run the country with your money this way.
Dirty money pipelines and corporate secrecy also turn theft into a disappearing act—shell firms, land flips, offshore fog. Beneficial ownership rules were meant to switch on the lights; instead, the doors slammed shut.
Campaign finance remains a black hole where favours are prepaid and the invoice arrives later as policy—quiet tax waivers here, a “strategic bailout” there, a sovereign guarantee stapled to your children’s future without your consent.
Central bank also sits inside a revolving door: technocrats glide between Treasury, State House and multilateral institutions. Don’t confuse competence with independence.
When appointments are made by the same networks profiting from the debt machine, why are we surprised when monetary policy starts to sound like politics by other means?
So let’s name it: this crisis was engineered. In committee rooms and Cabinet meetings. In boardrooms and tender committees. Through misused emergency budgets, fantasy forecasts, illegal borrowing and selective law enforcement.
The architects are not in exile; they are in office. They cut ribbons. They chair oversight meetings. They tweet reform while drafting the next supplementary budget.
What now?
First, refuse amnesia. Demand a full, public, forensic audit of our debt: who lent, at what terms, who signed, where did the money go? Where borrowing broke the law, attach personal liability. Make quarterly debt reporting mandatory, plain-language and public.
Second, end opacity. Move procurement end-to-end to e-GP with public, real-time dashboards. Publish beneficial owners—no exceptions.
Hard-ban unmarked cash across government. Run biometric payroll audits to delete ghost workers and expose double-dippers. Cap allowances, pay clean salaries and freeze the creation of new agencies and titles unless there’s sustainable revenue.
Third, protect the referees. Guarantee the budgets and independence of the Auditor-General, Controller of Budget, Anti-Corruption Commission and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Establish anti-corruption courts with public clocks—deadlines visible to every Kenyan. When a case stalls, the lights should blink red, not fade to black.
But none of this moves without civic power. This is the line we keep for “later.” Later is how you lose a decade. Register to vote. Verify your registration.
Get your people to register; 2027 is an urgent deadline. If the same architects remain, the blueprint won’t change. You cannot tax yourself out of a heist—you vote out the crew, hire a new foreman, and rewrite the building code.
Let our new mantra be ruthless in its clarity: no more debt in darkness. No more budgets built on fantasy. No more paying the elite twice—first as lenders, then as “winning” contractors. We are not helpless. Register. Organise. Vote like your payslip depends on it—because it does.
