Kenya is not a poor country—it is a country where poverty has become policy. Agriculture contributes roughly 20% of GDP and employs millions, yet food prices remain painfully high. More than 80% of Kenyan workers survive in the informal economy, often without stable income or social protection, while an estimated 800,000 young people enter the job market every year with too few formal jobs waiting. At the same time, public debt has climbed beyond KSh 11 trillion, and every new budget seems to demand higher taxes instead of higher production. Ordinary Kenyans are told to tighten their belts while the machinery of government continues to consume.
Look around. The boda boda rider works from dawn until midnight yet struggles to fuel the motorcycle. The market trader watches customers bargain over a handful of tomatoes because household budgets have collapsed. Parents skip meals so children can stay in school. Patients are sent to buy gloves, syringes, or medicine before receiving treatment. Yet government offices continue to expand, official convoys still speed through traffic, conferences fill luxury hotels, and billions disappear through procurement scandals that rarely end in meaningful accountability. A nation that cannot consistently fund essential public services somehow always finds money for the comforts of power.
The crisis is deeper than corruption. It is an economy where production is too often overshadowed by extraction. Instead of creating wealth through industry, value addition, and decent jobs, the burden falls on taxation, borrowing, and consumption. Every increase in fuel prices ripples through transport, food, and electricity costs. Every new tax reaches the dinner table before it reaches the boardroom. The result is a familiar cycle: citizens produce, the state extracts, debt grows, and the ordinary Kenyan is asked to sacrifice again.
A nation cannot tax its way into prosperity while borrowing to finance consumption. Kenya’s greatest resource is not its debt, its politicians, or its institutions—it is its people. The revolutionary task is to demand a state that measures success not by the size of its budget, the length of its motorcades, or the number of ministries, but by whether families can afford food, young people can find dignified work, businesses can grow, and public services function without bribery or privilege. Until government becomes lean enough to serve rather than feed on the people, the nation will remain broke while the state grows fat.
Okoth Osewe
About the Author
