Kenya sinks deeper into debt as World Bank approves 75 billion loan

Public debt

The government has finally succeeded in acquiring yet another loan towards its costly projects.

The National Treasury wrote to the World Bank in March seeking an urgent loan for budget support towards President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Big 4 Agenda.

The treasury sought Sh75 billion, which the World Bank on Thursday, May 30 approved.

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The approval, albeit a victory for the government is a disaster in the offing for the common mwananchi.

With the approved new debt, Kenya’s public debt is likely to go beyond Sh5.5 trillion by close of the year.

This while the Controller of Budget (CoB) earlierthis year raised the red flag on Kenya’s ballooning debt, warning that the country stands to spend more than Sh61 billion out of every Sh100 billion collected by the taxman for debt repayment.

CoB in fact predicted that the government will not be able to sustain its development projects given the preceding debts- a predicament that has come to live seeing as we now have an addition Sh75 billion budget.

Public debt repayment is normally a first-charge expenditure, which means that the Treasury pays it before it can spend on anything else.

This would in retrospect mean either a standstill in projects ensues or getting buried in more debts.

With an ever increasing appetite for the debts, it is only in God we trust that the humongous debts will somehow be a thing of the past.

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