Nairobi, September 8

Gatundu South legislator, Moses Kuria, has revealed why the country’s internal and external debts have grown so exponentially.

Kuria, who is currently in the US, told Citizen TV during an interview on Newsnight Tuesday, September 7, that State House bribed them to approve budget appropriations without rigorously scrutinising the contents.

Mr Kuria served as a member of the National Assembly Committee of Budget between 2014 and 2020 when he was ousted after falling out with the ruling Jubilee Party.

The outspoken legislator revealed how the committee members would be summoned to the State House and given tokens in order to pass the budget appropriations without questioning them.

“Every year before we pass the budget, we (members of Jubilee and NASA) would be called to State House led by the ODM chairman, John Mbadi, and we would be given goodies for our constituencies so that we shut up and pass everything in the budget as was,” revealed the outspoken legislator.

Mr Kuria revealed the legislators would then approve the budget appropriations by the Treasury, including raising the country’s debt ceiling, without questioning them. 

While taking responsibility and apologising to Kenyans for his failure to play the oversight role as required, the Deputy President William Ruto-allied legislator said the current debt crisis in the country should squarely be blamed on the Members of Parliament and the bribes from State House.

“We continuously lied to Kenyans since 2014 and I know I failed in my oversight role as a legislator. I want to tender my apologies to the people of Kenya for failing them.”

Since the Jubilee administration took over the country’s leadership, the national debt has surpassed the Ksh7 trillion, with external debts topping Ksh4 billion, a bulk of them coming from the Chinese government, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Early in the year, Kenyans, aggrieved by the government’s appetite for loans, took to the social media pages of IMF asking the international lender not to advance any further loans to the country.