Nderitu Mureithi: Kenya needs to pause borrowing
By Mabonga Makhanu, May 26, 2026The Kenya Revenue Board Chair, Nderitu Mureithi, has suggested that with the current debt situation bedevilling Kenya, for the country to recover from such a menace, it needs to pause borrowing for a period of 12 to 18 months.
While speaking during a radio interview on a morning show on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the former governor, who doubles as an economist, proposed that this could have been the best way to recover from the skyrocketing debt situation.
He cited 2002, when the debt-to-GDP ratio was at 70 per cent, which is slightly lower than the current situation, which, according to the IMF, stands at 71.6 per cent, when the late former president Mwai Kibaki took over power.
To make matters worse, according to Nderitu, by then the bulk of the debt was short-term, involving 180-day to one-year Treasury bills.
“It’s not that you can never borrow; you can pause the borrowing, and I hold the view strongly that in our time we need to stop borrowing for a period of 12 to 18 months.”
2002 situation
What the government then did, according to the former governor, was to stop borrowing further and allow banks to issue loans to Kenyans for them to invest, as well as to the private sector, so as to generate more revenue in the form of taxes.
These reforms bore fruit, and by the end of 2004, according to Nderitu, the debt situation had been neutralised, with the country for the first time experiencing a balanced budget where there was a surplus revenue of Ksh1 billion.
In that year, the total revenue collected was more than the expenditure that had been earmarked for that particular period.
Kenya’s debt situation
Nderitu stated that the country can revert to the same situation and recover from the current debt crisis, which has now reached a ceiling of up to KSh13 trillion, comprising KSh7.55 trillion in external debt and KSh5.77 trillion in domestic debt.
He went on to state that, despite such efforts, the country, however, reverted to its old habits of borrowing, plunging the nation into a debt crisis that has been inherited by subsequent regimes until the current situation, where the country is unsure of how to recover.