President Kenyatta’s comments during an Interview with CNN’s Richard Quest recored on Friday reiterated that the country’s lenders are not only China but also Japan, United States, and many others.
The president made the remarks in an interview saying that Kenya has a healthy mix of debt and that Kenyans should not only focus on china talk because there are other states that have lent money to the country.
China isn’t Kenya’s only lender, Uhuru Kenyatta tells CNN: President Kenyatta says county has a “healthy mix of debt” with many lenders. https://t.co/DId44zoSMe
— Breaking News (@News_Kenya) October 30, 2018
Mr Quest was probing the president on whether he is weary of China’s “another agenda” in the loans it is giving to African states.
“Why are we focusing ourselves only on one lender?” Mr Kenyatta asked.
“As far as I am concerned, we have a very healthy mix of debt from the multilateral lenders — who are basically the World Bank and the African Development Bank — to bilateral lenders like Japan, China, France, all who are participating and working with us to help us achieve our objectives,” added Mr Kenyatta.
The president said that Kenya has an infrastructure gap that needs to be filled and his government is going to work with partners across the globe who are willing to partner and to work with us.
The president noted that Japan is the biggest lender to Kenya’s port projects while France is a major funder of electricity generation projects. He also insisted that Kenya’s high ratio of debt against the gross domestic product (GDP) does not bother him.
“What would worry me is if the debt that we have incurred has gone into recurrent expenditure, has gone into paying salaries or electricity bills and so on and so forth. But what we have utilized our debt for is to close the infrastructure gap,” he said.
Owing to the discussion with Richard Quest what bothers me is how the president will control graft cases that are still yet to be discovered so that what the President fears may not come to pass. That is what actually worries me. What do you think?
