EXPERT COMMENT: MPs should reject roads fund bill in entirety

Kenya’s infrastructure deficit is not a product of institutional scarcity. It is a product of execution failure, procurement corruption, and fiscal opacity. Adding a new fund to broken systems adds another layer of dysfunction with reduced oversight.

As of 2024, Kenya already had over 60 public funds operating outside the Consolidated Fund, many with overlapping mandates, weak oversight, and poor reporting, a proliferation that the Controller of Budget has flagged as a major governance risk.

Article 206 of the Constitution is unambiguous: all public revenue must flow through the Consolidated Fund and be subject to parliamentary appropriation.

The proposed Fund risks creating a semi-autonomous financial reservoir where Cabinet-level officials can deploy significant public resources without annual parliamentary approval, the very arrangement Article 206 was designed to prevent. Parliament cannot pass legislation premised on information the responsible Cabinet Secretary has admitted, under oath, was misleading.

Instead, Kenya should deepen its infrastructure bond market, reform the PPP framework, enforce fiscal discipline by rationalising the recurrent budget (which has grown 63 per cent from Sh3.1 trillion to Sh4.9 trillion against low single-digit GDP growth), and strengthen procurement oversight at project inception — where the greatest losses occur.

We want MPs to reject the National Infrastructure Fund Bill, 2026, in its entirety as constitutionally defective, governance-deficient, and institutionally redundant. The lawmakers should commission an independent constitutional review of the Bill’s compatibility with Article 206 before further consideration.

We also want the National Treasury to account for all existing extra-budgetary public funds before any new fund is created, and also prioritise strengthening existing infrastructure financing instruments over institutional multiplication.

Kenya is not suffering from a shortage of institutions or financial instruments. Kenya is suffering from a crisis of governance — a persistent, structural failure of the state to spend resources transparently, enforce accountability, and protect the interests of ordinary citizens over powerful insiders.

The National Infrastructure Fund Bill will not cure this crisis, nor will the Safaricom divestiture. These are not solutions to Kenya’s development deficit; they are distractions from it, and in the wrong hands they become instruments for deepening the same elite capture that has stunted Kenya’s growth for generations.

Excerpts of the United Opposition statement on the Infrastructure Fund