The government is grotesquely borrowing to finance its overwhelming fiscal budget but these public resources are being channeled to investments possessing little value for money thus arraying massive scale of wastage and a tide of corruption.
In an expose, Kenya lost a big opportunity which could have employed many of its youths who end up gambling with everything to an extent of killing oneself after running bankrupt.
Samsung had been targeting Kenya as its base to build an assembly plant for the Eastern African region and a top government official asked for a $10m parting kickback for the license forcing them to move to Ethiopia. One governor asked for a $10m kickback – an amount that was larger than the intended capital of the proposed investment.
Both levels of government have chosen a more expansive role and a big government is the perfect perch for bureaucrats to latch on for their rent-seeking behaviors as we are seeing now.
Kenya is ranked amongst the world’s most corrupt countries. It came 145 out of 174 nations on the recent Transparency International’s global corruption perceptions index.
In 2014 the Kenya government floated a $2.75 billion Eurobond at the Irish Stock Exchange but according to the Auditor General and Controller of Budget, the money was deposited and spent from a mysterious offshore account whose signatories are not known.
A report shows that there is an audaciously ignorant understanding of what constitutes public resources and the need for them to be protected in this country. No one knows who in government is running these foreign accounts, contrary to the law, where the Eurobond proceeds were also deposited. Treasury Cabinet Secretary said that $2 billion of the Eurobond was pumped into the budget for government spending but there are little traces of it.
