Sh6,164,439,173,574. This is a number in Kenya’s public accounts that should stop the entire country cold, yet almost nobody is talking about it. At a time of fiscal strain, this should be an intolerable failure.

The Central Bank’s record of what we owe and the National Treasury’s record of the same debt differ by more than Sh6 trillion.

Two of the state’s own account books, describing one debt, cannot agree with each other to within six trillion shillings. This is the stuff you’d expect to prompt a discussion on rounding errors, but no. It is a sum larger than half the national debt, a sum bigger than our annual budget (deficit and all), and it has quietly lost its shadow somewhere between two ledgers meant to describe the same thing.

We live in a country where the variance in accounting for a debt responsible for the unbearable economic situation we are all facing is a whole Sh6 trillion.

We know the number at all because a network of Kenyans has spent years forcing it into the light. Okoa Uchumi, bringing together more than 40 civil society and human rights organisations, alongside individual petitioners, most notably Senator Okiya Omtatah, auditors and lawyers, have carried the matter into courtrooms and committee rooms when the state would have preferred silence.

Deduction on a payslip

Since 2019, they have filed the same petitions, demanded the same forensic audit, and been met with the same institutional shrug. Their persistence is the only reason the figures are public at all. Left to the government, the ledgers would never have been laid side by side.

Since 2013, roughly Sh6.9 trillion was borrowed in our name, much of it without the oversight the Constitution plainly demands. Article 201 requires openness and accountability in all matters of public finance. Article 226 requires that public money be handled through processes that can be audited and traced.

These are not aspirational sentiments but binding instructions, and the debt was accumulated as though they did not exist. Loans arrived without parliamentary approval, and borrowing blatantly exceeded (and continues to skyrocket further beyond) the ceilings Parliament set. At the end of it sits a discrepancy so large that the two units of government responsible for tracking the money cannot tell the same story about where it is.

This is what fiscal opacity actually is. It is far beyond a headline you skim on the way to something else. It’s a decision, made in rooms you will never enter, about who eats and who pays. Every shilling that cannot be traced is a shilling that went somewhere, and that somewhere is never your village. It is never a health centre with a clinician posted to it, never a road that arrives as tarmac rather than a promise renewed every five years. Untraceable money is not lost. Money is never lost. It is spent on people who prefer that you cannot follow it.

And the borrowing must still be serviced, which is where the abstraction becomes a deduction on a payslip. The state now spends over a trillion shillings a year on interest alone.

That is more than it transfers to all 47 counties combined. More than it spends keeping its own citizens alive and educated. It is the housing levy skimmed from wages. It is the extra shilling on every litre of fuel and paraffin. It is the tax paid by people who cannot point to a single completed thing the loan produced. They pay for the road twice, once in the borrowing and again at the pump, and never once in tarmac they can actually walk on.

Anti-money-laundering laws

A country that spends more repaying lenders than governing its people has effectively been repurposed. Its primary economic function is no longer development. It is debt service. The budget that should build the factories, the irrigation, the small industries that transform a school certificate into a wage, is instead routed, over a trillion shillings of it every year, back out to creditors. The young leave school into an economy that was, on paper, financed to receive them, and find nothing waiting. The money meant to build their future was borrowed.

Where it went is the entire question, and the one the state has spent years avoiding. The government’s answer, when pressed, is to promise reform. New anti-money-laundering laws. New fiscal frameworks. New commitments to transparency, announced with the same confidence as the borrowing that created the problem. But you cannot reform your way out of a discrepancy you will not first explain. Before any new framework, there is a prior obligation the state keeps skipping: account for the Sh6.16 trillion. Reconcile the two ledgers. Show, line by line, how the same debt produced two irreconcilable records. Everything else is a distraction.

This is why the work of the Okoa Uchumi coalition members, Senator Okiya and the litigants around it, matters beyond any single case. They are not asking for sympathy or new promises.

They are asking for the one thing this government has been most reluctant to provide: a reconciled account of what was borrowed, from whom, on what terms, and to what end. It is the most basic demand a citizen can make of a state that borrows in their name, and the difficulty of extracting it tells you how the money was handled.

We were told the money was borrowed for us. For our roads, our hospitals, our factories, our futures. We would like, at the very least, to be shown where it went. Until two of the state’s own ledgers can agree on that to within six trillion shillings, every assurance of reform is a signature on a document nobody has been allowed to read.

lewisngunyi10@gmail.com