Mar 20, 2026 (Africa Check/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --
Kenya's finance minister defends infrastructure fund but includes misleading claims
The minister was right about the size of Kenya's debt but mangled some of his figures, including when repayments crossed 50% of revenues. On education, he presented a partial picture, claiming the sector receives 27% of total spending. In reality, that figure applies only to a subset of expenditure; the full picture is considerably less generous. While he was right about current power generation, his framing that Kenya "needs" 10,000 MW of electricity blurs the line between long-term ambitions and actual demand. Official plans set lower targets.
At a presidential signing on 9 March 2026, Kenyan finance minister John Mbadi defended a controversial new law to fund infrastructure without new debt or taxes.
The National Infrastructure Fund Act introduces a new financing model. President William Ruto said its first major project would be upgrading the country's main airport.
But the law has been challenged in court, and analysts have raised corruption concerns.
Mbadi said shrinking fiscal space, debt pressures and the fear of political backlash to new taxes had placed "real constraints on policy choices".
He argued the law would help fund major projects, including upgraded ports, expanded power supply, new highways and irrigation.
In defending it, Mbadi made a number of claims about Kenya's economy, debt, education spending and energy needs. We took a closer look at some of them.
Mbadi said Kenya's public debt is "approximately around 67% to date of GDP".
Gross domestic product is a commonly used measure of the size of a country's economy. It refers to the market value of all goods and services produced during a given period, usually a year.
The debt-to-GDP ratio shows how large a country's debt is relative to its economy. If it is low, it means that debt is relatively small compared to the economy, and the country can repay debt without too much difficulty.
Official data supports the minister's claim. Kenya's debt-to-GDP ratio decreased slightly from 68.1% in 2021 to 67.8% in 2025, according to the national treasury, which is obligated by law to regularly report on debt.
The latest available data shows it at 67.5% of GDP in December 2025.
Kenya's "debt service obligations consume more than half of ordinary revenue", the minister said.
Ordinary revenue includes taxes collected by the country's tax agency, in addition to appropriation-in-aid which is revenue from government ministries and departments, such as user charges.
The data also supports the minister here:
In the 2024/25 financial year, 71.2% of revenue went to debt service, according to the treasury. This was KSh1.72 trillion of KSh2.42 trillion in revenue. (Note: One US dollar exchanges at about 130 Kenyan shillings.) The controller of budget said in the first half of 2025/26, 74.3% of revenue went to debt service. This was KSh923.14 billion of the KSh1.243 trillion in revenues collected between July and December 2025. Treasury data up to February 2026 puts the figure at 74.1% - of KSh1.6 trillion in revenue, debt service took up KSh1.19 trillion.
The minister said debt service would likely take up 48.7% of ordinary revenue in the 2026/27 financial year.
But official figures don't support this. The latest debt report, from September 2025, projected the ratio at 73.7%, dropping to 68.2% in 2027/28.
More recent figures from the budget policy statement signed off by the minister in February 2026 projected revenues of KSh2.9 trillion in 2026/27 and debt service of Ksh1.54 trillion - about 53%.
The latest official projection shows 53%. An earlier official projection put the figure at 73.7%.
Put another way, the government's own documents, issued six months apart, differ significantly and neither matches the minister's 48.7% claim.
The minister said Kenya's debt service had crossed the 50% mark. This is accurate but incomplete. The ratio exceeded 50% in the 2022/23 financial year, reaching 58.9%, and has remained above that level since.
His statement suggests this was a one-off or in the past. The data shows that this is a line the country crossed in Ruto's first year in office, and has remained above that level since.
Projections also show the ratio staying above 50% over the next three financial years - 73.7% in 2026/27, 68.2% in 2027/28, and 53.3% in 2028/29. The claim is misleading.
The minister said: "It will interest Kenyans to know that we are spending close to 27% of our expenditure, total expenditure, in supporting education in this country. Yet you still hear complaints that we are not supporting education enough."
In his budget speech on 12 June 2025, the minister said he planned to spend KSh702.7 billion, representing 16.4% of the total government spending of KSh4.292 trillion. Actual spending in the first half of the year was in the same range (16.8%).
So where does the 27% come from? The national budget has two broad spending streams:
Ministries, agencies and departments, which account for 54% of total expenditure. The remainder is spent on debt repayments, pensions, gratuities, money due to counties and other funds paid from the consolidated fund.
The minister's 27% figure only measures education's share within the first of these streams, where of KSh2.55 trillion, ministries and departments will spend KSh2.55 trillion on education. In the first six months, they spent KSh366 billion on education, or 31% of KSh1.176 trillion
But when education spending is measured against the full budget, it comes to roughly 16.4% and not 27%.
Mbadi's figure therefore leaves out nearly half the budget from the denominator, significantly overstating education's share of the whole pie. In other words, it is a fraction of a fraction.
Mbadi also said Kenya's energy sector needed more money. He then put power generation at "just well over 3,000 megawatts".
Kenya's national statistics agency regularly publishes power generation figures, using data from Kenya Power, the country's electricity utility, and KenGen, the power-generating company.
The data agency's reporting usually shows the "installed capacity", or the theoretical maximum output the power system is designed to operate at, and the "effective capacity", the maximum output when the system is operating under real world constraints.
The latest data showed the country's installed capacity was a preliminary 3,235.5 megawatts (MW) in 2024. The effective capacity was at a provisional figure of 3,107.8 MW.
The energy regulator, the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra), also published data showing that the grid's installed capacity as of 30 June 2025 was 3,192 MW, while effective capacity was 3,082 MW.
Epra's data comes from different sources, from hydro and geothermal to waste heat recovery, where extra heat from factories is reused to make power.
Publicly available data supports Mbadi's claim.
Kenya Power reported peak electricity demand of 2,439 MW in December 2025, the highest on record.
The energy ministry's 2025-2030 plan targets nearly doubling renewable capacity to 5,952 MW by 2030.
Mbadi appeared to reference Ruto's 2025 state of the nation address, where he said Kenya needed an additional 10,000 MW over seven years to support industrialisation.
But this target is not new. It was in former president Uhuru Kenyatta's 2013 manifesto, when Ruto was his running mate. This pledged 10,000 MW in a decade and 25,000 MW by 2030.
The claim blurs the line between long-term ambitions and actual demand. Official plans set lower targets.
COMTEX_475618724/2029/2026-03-20T10:00:28
by Makinia Juma Sylvia
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