Former Governor Bank Njuguna Ndung’u has been nominated as Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury and planning in William Ruto’s government.

Njuguna Ndung’u exited the Central Bank after having served for the constitutional eight years between 2007 and 2015.

He takes over the treasury docket that is broke amid high inflation,severe economic debt, and drought crisis in some parts of the nation, a very similar situation to when he ascended to the helm of the Central Bank of Kenya.

The national debt burden stands at 8.6 trillion and is expected to increase to 9.8 trillion by the next fiscal year.

Njuguna Ndungu is an economist, university don, and economic researcher. He pursued a Bachelor of Economics at the University of Nairobi where he also did his masters degree. He pursued his doctorate from a Swedish  University.

He significantly contributed to the improvement of the economy during Kibaki’s era shortly after the 2007 post-election violence as governor of the Central Bank of Kenya.

At the time, the economy had reached a  near standstill with the GDP dropping to 1.5 percent.

Within two years under his stewardship, the economy grew by 8.1 percent.

Banks adopted policies that propelled their growth year by year.

During his tenure, there was growth in capital markets with the entry of new firms at the Nairobi Stock Exchange.

In 2018, he was appointed executive director of the pan-African economic research think-tank African Consortium.

In the run-up to the August 2022 elections, he was also instrumental in crafting President Ruto’s manifesto and modeling his bottom-up approach toward economic recovery.

The bottom-up approach advocates for job creation, eradication of hunger, decreasing the cost of living, expansion of the tax base, inclusive growth, and improving the country’s foreign exchange balance.

The six pillars the Kenya Kwanza government promised to focus on to actualize the bottom-up approach include Agriculture, healthcare, environment, and climate change, Digital superhighway and creative economy, housing and settlement, and micro, small and medium enterprise economy(MSME).