Last week, the National Treasury unveiled a budget that threatens to cross the psychological frontier of Sh5 trillion — an amount that could, in theory, make Kenya a First World country overnight.
The government plans to spend Sh4.7 trillion in 2026/27, up from Sh4.5 trillion last year, according to the Budget Policy Statement. Of that, Sh3.46 trillion will go to recurrent expenditure — paying salaries, running ministries and maintaining the sprawling machinery of State — while only Sh749.5 billion is earmarked for development projects, many of which may never take off. Revenues are projected at Sh3.53 trillion, leaving a deficit of over Sh1 trillion to be paid for through borrowing.
Kenya’s addiction to borrowing is structural: each year’s deficit becomes the following year’s debt repayment, which in turn justifies more borrowing. The result is a financial treadmill from which the government has neither the ability nor the intent to step off. Meanwhile, the recurrent expenditure that dominates the budget is less about service delivery than sustaining the administrative skeleton of government itself.
No one disputes that civil servants must be paid, hospitals must operate, and teachers must teach. But Kenya’s recurrent spending has grown far beyond what is required to deliver these services efficiently.
Over the decades, the public payroll has expanded through political patronage, bureaucratic duplication, and a national addiction to task forces, advisory committees, and state corporations. Every administration promises rationalisation, each in turn discovers that pruning bureaucracy is politically painful, and quietly shelves the resulting reports. The bureaucracy remains, growing quietly like a well-watered weed.
Kenya today operates two elaborate layers of administration. At the top sits the national government with ministries, agencies, and an ecosystem of advisers, consultants, and task forces. Beneath it sits 47 county governments, each with its own bureaucracy. Devolution has merely replicated the vices of the national government at a smaller scale. In some counties, corruption has been decentralised with remarkable efficiency.
Before devolution, the central government squandered resources with studied enthusiasm. Entire ministries functioned as employment bureaus for political loyalists. Development projects were launched with fanfare and abandoned once the cameras left.
Today, the national government refuses to let counties govern. A report by Katiba Institute last year revealed that national government spends more money on devolved functions than counties. Ministries routinely establish offices in every county to mirror county departments.
National agencies launch projects that duplicate county programmes. Roads, hospitals, agriculture and livestock management services — everything counties are constitutionally mandated to manage — suddenly come with national branding for national politicians seeking to score points. The counties, meanwhile, are constrained, underfunded, and sidelined.
The national government treats county mandates as optional while prioritising its own visibility as an imperative. County hospitals, roads, and water projects lag — not because counties are incompetent, but because the national government insists on running parallel programmes. This duplication is what is mischaracterised as the cost of devolution.
Complaints about the cost of devolution often come from the same political leaders who ensure that duplication of roles at the national level continues. When Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi brought out the BPS, he suggested a reduction in government — usually code for downsizing devolution. MP Mohammed Abdi Affey asked the simple question: Can Kenya have counties deliver services as mandated, while the national government stops competing for credit?
Devolution is the sacred cow of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, and attacks on it only serve to elevate its status. For all its imperfections, it has done something the old centralised State never managed: it has forced Kenya to confront historic inequalities. Roads now reach places that once existed only as dots on maps. County hospitals have become lifelines where referral facilities once required a day’s journey.
The tragedy would be to mistake the cost of that revolution for its failure. The real cost of governance in Kenya is not counties; it is a political culture that treats the State as an employment bureau for the politically connected.
The Budget Policy Statement also reflects the legacy of a borrowing spree that has dominated Kenyan fiscal planning for a decade. The president this week reallocated a teacher’s employment letter at a funeral and promised a number of jobs.
Heavy infrastructure borrowing since 2013 now consumes resources that might otherwise fund genuine development or social services. Yet the BPS offers little structural shift away from borrowing as the default financing mechanism, instead plugging deficits with a mix of domestic and external debt, and hoping that economic growth eventually makes it manageable. Hope is not a fiscal strategy.
The 2026/27 BPS reveals a government whose highest priority remains the preservation of its own machinery.
If Kenyans want a cheaper, smarter government, the solution is fewer duplicating agencies, a clearer division of responsibilities, and a political class willing to treat public money with the same care it applies to personal wealth.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
