The Governor of the Central Bank didn't spare the National Treasury, while presenting before the National Assembly's Finance & Planning Committee, today on the issue of fiscal dominance.
Subtle tackles.
#MbadiProposedTaxChangeExplainer
What's happened to a 50K Kenyan payslip & how does @JohnMbadiN's proposal compare?
Are #Kenyans better off?
New deductions have squeezed take-home pay, while wage rises have lagged inflation in this period, save for 2025.
Reflecting on what stops us from being #ActiveCitizenKE
Recognise any of these 7 today in any area of your life?
1. Bystander effect: Assuming someone else will step in.
2. Diffusion of responsibility: Someone else is responsible, no need for me to act.
3. Moral disengagement: Not my role, others know better, and the consequences are just that severe.
4. Learned helplessness: My actions will not make a difference.
5. Pluralistic ignorance: I remain silent because everyone else appears unconcerned.
6. Institutional inertia: We are too bureaucratic, risk averse or lack resources.
7. Possibility of harm: My action might be worse than inaction
1/ Kenya's payslips keep changing. This year has already brought around four changes to tax laws, and that churn makes it hard for households and businesses to plan. From my interview on @ntvkenya's #FixingtheNation 🧵
4/ Inflation adds to the squeeze. A Kenyan earning Sh100,000 in 2025 was about 5% poorer than one earning the same in 2021, because prices rose faster than pay. A tax relief helps, but it doesn't replace pay that keeps up.
1/What is Kenya’s proposed PAYE relief actually worth? For the roughly 1.5 million formal workers earning Sh32,333 or less, we ran through the numbers on @ntvkenya’s #FixingtheNation 🧵
4/The catch is where it lands: on a payslip the new NSSF rates and the #HousingLevy have already been eating into. What it does to take-home pay depends on every line on the payslip, PAYE included.
Excited to be #FixingtheNation tomorrow morning as Kenya stares down a new proposal to reduce taxes on lower income earners in its latest 2026/27 budget.
What are you keen to hear? What questions are you asking? 👇🏾@ntvkenya@EricLatiff
Two features @WhatsApp should introduce:
1. Schedule send message
2. AI summary of voice notes.
The people shall not be held hostage to impromptu podcasts! 👐🏿
The Controller of Budget declaring that she cannot see certain funds and levies because they sit outside the Consolidated Fund is a constitutional red flag. Article 206(1) of the Constitution establishes the Consolidated Fund as the central account into which all money raised or received by or on behalf of the national government must be paid, save for narrowly defined exceptions that an Act of Parliament must expressly authorise. By constitutional design, public money must be traceable and accountable. Anything less erodes the rule of law and weakens the foundations of public finance that the 2010 Constitution sought to entrench.
Legally, the National Treasury administers the Consolidated Fund, and the Controller of Budget must approve any withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund and other public funds under Article 206(4) and Article 228(5). The Constitution prohibits withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund unless the Controller has approved it and the withdrawal is in accordance with appropriation or other constitutional authority. When revenues are channelled into vehicles that do not pass through this framework, the Controller loses visibility and Parliament loses leverage. The Controller’s own warning in the Sovereign Wealth Fund debate, that a fund which does not first credit proceeds into the Consolidated Fund and is not subject to her prior approval risks operating as a parallel financial architecture outside the national budget framework, captures the main problem which is governance by discretion rather than by law.
The Controller of Budget’s National Government Budget Implementation Review Report for FY 2025/26 (July 1, 2025–June 30, 2026) records total travel expenditure of KSh 30.69 billion, comprising KSh 21.98 billion on domestic travel and KSh 8.71 billion on foreign travel. State House was the top spender on travel at KSh 2.5 billion (KSh 2.4 billion domestic, KSh 159 million foreign), followed by the State Department for Internal Security and National Administration (KSh 1.4 billion), the State Department for Immigration and Citizen Services (KSh 1.1 billion), and the Office of the Deputy President (KSh 655 million). Such figures are troubling not just for their size but because they occur in a context where oversight is described as blind for certain funds and levies thus rendering promises of austerity difficult to enforce.
The Constitution does not entertain secret budgets. Every shilling raised from citizens must flow through proper channels with clear oversight by Parliament and independent offices such as the Controller of Budget and the Auditor-General. If money bypasses the Treasury, it bypasses the people’s control. That is poor administration and a departure from the constitutional order. The remedy is to route all revenue through the Consolidated Fund, publish full and timely accounts and empower auditors and Parliament to follow every shilling with enforceable rules on withdrawals and appropriations.
And that fellow Kenyans, is how public money is spent without being budgeted for or approved. Legally. We need tighter regulations on Art. 223. Folks taking emergency spending fi joke 🤦🏿♂️
Dr. Margaret Nyakang’o: Our culprit is the supplementary budget. During the supplementary budget, a lot of things happen that are not closely scrutinized to the level that we scrutinize the original budget. For counties, the supplementary budget does come for approval; we must look at it, and they must justify the changes, but they always justify moving the money to travel, and that is how we end up with a very large figure #CitizenTonight
Dr. Margaret Nyakang’o: Zero-based budgeting has been done on paper, but in reality, I have not seen it. What we are doing in terms of actual execution does not reflect zero-based budgeting. It is not as simple as it looks
#CitizenTonight
Interesting point from our @CoB_Kenya here. So health worker wages would still be recurrent? Even though the benefit of treatment they offer can accrue across years e.g. if they save ones life?
Dr. Margaret Nyakang’o: Recurrent expenditure is all-inclusive; it just means expenditure that is only for this year, and it is not of a development nature. If it is of a development nature, it means that the benefits will accrue for more than one financial year #CitizenTonight
Dr. Margaret Nyakang’o: Recurrent expenditure is all-inclusive; it just means expenditure that is only for this year, and it is not of a development nature. If it is of a development nature, it means that the benefits will accrue for more than one financial year #CitizenTonight