Controller of Budget Dr Margaret Nyakang’o has clarified that the Office of the Spouse of Deputy President Prof Kithure Kindiki did not spend Sh44.52 million as carried in her report for the first six months of the 2025/26 fiscal year.
Dr Nyakang’o, in her March 12, 2026 clarification to Mr Moses Mbaruku, the Principal Administrative Secretary, Office of the Deputy President (ODP), states that her office made the decision after cross-checking the budget performance report submitted by the ODP.
She noted that she “concurs” that the analysis of her National Government Budget Implementation Review Report (NGBIRR), published on the Office of the Controller of Budget (OCoB) website, was incorrectly mapped.
“The report contained incorrectly mapped expenditure of Sh44.52 million to the Office of the Spouse of the DP (OSDP) Affirmative Action Intervention sub-programme instead of the Government Strategic Priority Intervention’s sub-programme,” says Dr Nyakang'o.
“My office regrets the error and has since taken the earliest opportunity to correct it in the republished report on the OCoB website,” she says, adding, “going forward, we will institute necessary interventions to avoid a repeat of similar errors in the future.”
The CoB clarification followed interventions by the ODP after President William Ruto, in 2024, directed the freezing of funding to the offices of the first lady and to those of the spouses of the DP and the Prime Cabinet Secretary (PCS).
The freezing was part of austerity measures after the Finance Bill 2024, which had additional revenue projections of Sh346.3 billion to finance the 2024/25 fiscal year’s budget, fell through following deadly Gen Z protests over the Bill’s punitive taxation regime.
According to Dr Nyakang’o, the error arose from the “transposition of figures between two sub-programmes that followed each other on the reporting template.”
This, Dr Nyakang’o says, was further compounded by the fact that the ODP’s budget performance report for the first three months of the 2025/26 financial year, submitted to “this office”, indicated an expenditure of Sh265,000 under the same sub-programme, OSDP Affirmative Action Intervention.
“This Information was published in our NGBIRR report for the first quarter of the 2025/26 financial year, but was missing in the ODP’s submission for the first six months of the 2025/26 period, which may suggest inconsistent reporting,” notes Dr Nyakang’o.
