A couple of weeks ago, long before the Finance Bill was published, social media was awash with how the Finance Bill 2025 is such a punitive document. So many Kenyans swallowed the ruse, hook line and sinker and even leaders, whom you would expect to know better, begun sharing the content of a non-existent bill. This revealed an interesting phenomenon in our society today. Social media and artificial intelligence has led to rapid growth of the “mob” that James Madison warned about in his writings in Federalist Paper 10. There is a sectarianism in our public discourse which remains a festering wound in the body of our democracy; the desire to present oneself as an angel and their political opposition as the devil reincarnate.
Take the conversation around our public finance management and its implication on our politics today. When you engage in the conversation about public debt, there is an attempt in certain quarters to suggest that the high sovereign obligations that today undermine our sovereignty are a creation of the imprudence of this administration in general and William Ruto in particular. Yet just a little reading will tell you that both the Auditor General and Controller of Budget in their reports in 2021 could not ascertain how over Sh1 trillion proceeds of Eurobond neither got to the Consolidated Fund nor funded any project to point at. But you will hear people who presided over such grand sleaze today telling the young people to fight for their country. What country when you have already sold their future to the latter-day slave masters?
This brings me to the central thinking of this column today. Let us meaningfully engage in the upcoming public participation on National Government Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure for the Financial Year 2025/2026. We can no longer afford to sit back and hope things will be alright. Let us embrace the wisdom of Caius Cassius in the play Julius Caesar when he says, “The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.
The state of our democracy, including the prudent management of public finance, will be as good as the vigilance we are willing to invest in the process. For example, in the course of the previous administration, we opened many offshore bank accounts which ostensibly were supposed to help us settle some of the sovereign obligations that were falling due. But the truth is, they helped undermine transparency as there was no traceability. Such accounts also denied the country the economic multiplier effect that we would have experienced had the proceeds of Eurobond been channeled through the Consolidated Fund as envisaged by the Constitution. To date, these accounts have not been closed and Parliament owes us an explanation in this regard.
A reading of the Finance Bill reveals that the National Treasury is keen to seal revenue loopholes through modernisation of the tax administration structure. This will see us go after the tax cheats and ensure everyone bears their fair share of underwriting our socio-economic transformation. The question is how can we supplement this brilliant proposal by enriching it to best enhance service delivery? I say this knowing well that this initiative, even if implemented seamlessly, will take some time before the dividends begin to show.
What then happens to the immediate fiscal demands such as debt repayments, remittances to counties and capital expenditure among other services that the government must provide? This should make us to set up a bipartisan parliamentary committee to interrogate the loan books and return a verdict on the question of the odious debt. If that happens, this legislature shall have righted a wrong committed by the 9th Parliament generally and particularly by President Mwai Kibaki; the failure to act on the Kroll Report of 2004. At the altar of political expediency, the report was suppressed as those named were brought into the political fold. May we all summon the courage in this public participation exercise to ask all the hard questions and demand answers.
Mr Kidi is the convener of Inter-Parties Youth Forum. [email protected]
By Kidi Mwaga