A damning report by the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) accuses Parliament of failing to fulfill its constitutional duty regarding government borrowing, leading to a ballooning national debt and a future burden on taxpayers.
The report, argues the Kenyan Parliament kowtows to Executive, adding that it has abdicated its responsibility to scrutinise and approve foreign loans before they are contracted.
“In the financial year 2023-2024, the government took out 36 new foreign loans amounting to Sh898 billion. 27 were from multilateral lenders, six from commercial banks and three from bilateral lenders. Last year Kenya paid over half a trillion shillings in external principal repayments; in 2024 over 330 billion falls due. Between 2025 and 2027, the National Treasury must repay over 1.5 trillion shillings to foreign creditors,” says AfriCOG.
It notes: “The general public is neither consulted nor is there any concerted effort to inform them on the logic and details of the debt being incurred. It is bad enough that the public isn’t told about Executive borrowing, but even their representatives in the Parliament are kept out of the loop. The constitutional principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ implies the related idea of ‘no borrowing without representation’.”
This, AfriCOG says, violates Article 211 of the Kenyan Constitution, which grants Parliament the power to “authorise and regulate borrowing and impose reporting requirements.”
“Kenyan citizens will pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually over the next seven years, with a staggering lump sum repayment of $3 billion (Sh387 billion) due in 2031,” the report warns.