Kenya has reached that rare historical moment when it must choose whether to continue sinking under the weight of its own contradictions or rebuild the republic it once imagined.
The economic distress being experienced today is not merely a fiscal problem: It is a constitutional betrayal and a moral collapse.
The People’s Audit — a citizen-led governance and corruption diagnostic that runs parallel to the International Monetary Fund’s review — released last week by the Okoa Uchumi Coalition makes one thing clear: the Kenyan State has slowly mutated from a custodian of the common good into a conveyor belt for private enrichment. Kenya is not confronted with a shortage of policy options but a collapse of integrity.
Yet the Constitution still offers a route back to factory settings. Article 1 does not delegate sovereignty to technocrats, financiers or development partners. It vests power in the people. That provision was not meant for ceremonial citation; it is an instruction to citizens to reclaim the republic whenever it strays.
The audit lays bare six uncomfortable truths about the Kenya that has been created and is being tolerated.
First, fiscal governance has unravelled. Public debt has exploded from Sh2.4 trillion in 2014 to over Sh12 trillion today. For all that borrowing, hospitals still run out of drugs, classrooms still leak, and counties still send patients to harambees. Supplementary budgets and off-the-books obligations have reduced Parliament to a rubber stamp. Borrowing has ceased to be a development tool and been turned into an escape hatch from accountability.
Second, oversight institutions have been deliberately weakened. Implementation of audit recommendations has deteriorated from 45 per cent a decade ago to about 18 per cent today. Reports are produced, debated and shelved. Watchdogs bark loudly during budget season but fall silent when the feasting begins. The refusal to act on official audits heralds impunity as policy.
Third, political financing has entrenched corruption as a business model.
The Election Campaign Financing Act of 2013 remains an orphaned statute -- avoided with the same care a thief eschews street lighting. Politics has become a high-risk, high-return investment. Public office is no longer a call to service but a mechanism for debt repayment. Recent by-elections have merely confirmed what Kenyans already know: money, not ideas, determines access to power.
Fourth, devolution has replicated the very pathologies it was meant to cure. County governments have become smaller theatres of the same procurement fraud, tender manipulation and elite capture perfected at the national level. Instead of dispersing accountability, devolution has too often decentralised impunity.
Fifth, Kenya is experiencing a social unravelling. Sectors meant to protect citizens — health, education and food security — have been hollowed out by corruption and austerity. Poverty is no longer an unfortunate policy failure; it is a predictable outcome of fiscal choices that protect privilege and punish vulnerability.
Finally, when citizens have protested against these injustices, the State has responded to demands for dialogue with force. More than 200 Kenyans have died in protests over the past two years. This is the clearest evidence that fiscal injustice and human rights abuse are inseparable travelling companions. A State that cannot explain its budget resorts to batons and bullets.
These failures are not accidental but are part of a deliberate ecosystem that rewards impunity and marginalises honesty. If Kenya is to step back from the brink, reform must rest on three deceptively simple imperatives: truth, justice and accountability.
Truth demands radical transparency in how the State borrows, spends and contracts. Fiscal secrecy in Kenya is not a technical glitch; it is a political strategy. Debt agreements, procurement contracts and beneficial ownership data are hidden precisely because disclosure would disrupt greedy networks.
Justice requires budgeting with the citizen at the centre. Every budget should be interrogated for whom it burdens and whom it benefits. A fiscal framework that taxes the poor to protect the powerful is neither neutral nor inevitable.
No single institution can rescue Kenya. Parliament must rediscover its backbone by enforcing its Standing Orders, curbing the abuse of Article 223 on allowable emergency expenditure, and refusing to pass budgets that fail basic tests of equity and participation. The Judiciary has a constitutional duty to treat fiscal impunity as a threat to the republic, not an administrative inconvenience.
The Executive, which controls the levers of secrecy, must choose transparency if it seeks legitimacy. Access to debt documents and contracts should not require litigation. Civil society and citizens must continue acting as the nation’s conscience through citizen audits, strategic litigation and budget observatories. Development partners, too, must stop underwriting Kenya’s bad habits. Fiscal support that ignores governance failures merely deepens the burgeoning crisis.
The writer is board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
