Treasury CS John Mbadi and PS Chris Kiptoo with the International Monetary Fund team during the 2025 Spring Meetings. [File, Standard] We live in interesting times. Just as we were busy contemplating the sort of pro-poor, pro-people priorities that the Kenya Kwanza administration might share with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during their recent visit to discuss a new program, our National Treasury loudly announced that we’ve just refinanced yet another Eurobond (and borrowed 50 per cent more just for good measure). It’s the third time this is happening in two years, with Treasury gleefully noting that “it shows the…
Author: By Denis Kabaara
Treasury CS John Mbadi during the 2025 Budget reading on June 12th,2025 at Parliament [Elvis Ogina,Standard] It is instructive that the theme guiding the 2025 Budget Statement was economic recovery, rather than economic turnaround and transformation, or as put by the Head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors late last year, “navigating turbulence, driving transformation”. With the 2027 election in two years and only one full budget after 2025/26, where is “bottom-up”? The two most recent times we had economic recovery as a Kenyan theme were 2003/4 and 2020/21. NARC recovered the stable, but stagnant, economy inherited from Kanu…
The National Treasury and Economic Planning Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi during the launch of Economic Survey 2025 in Nairobi on May 6th, 2025.[Standard, Kanyiri Wahito] This week began with President William Ruto’s 1,000th day in office, with 792 days to the next General Election. Monday was also 349 days since the June 15, 2024 Finance Bill Gen Z-led protest. For the record, it was also 446 days since the fourth Medium-Term Plan (MTP IV) 2023-2027 under Vision 2030 and Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA), was published. Economic empowerment is this government’s latest brainwave. Reminiscent of any regime’s final life-phase known…