FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Date: Thursday, 30 April 2026 

NEW PUBLIC FINANCE LAWS MUST SERVE THE NATIONAL INTEREST, NOT CREATE NEW FISCAL RISKS 

The Okoa Uchumi Campaign calls on Parliament to halt the progression of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill, 2026 until a constitutionally grounded Sessional Paper is developed and subjected to meaningful public participation. Legislation designed to move fast is legislation designed to outrun scrutiny. Kenyans have seen this before, and they cannot afford to see it again. 

The Okoa Uchumi Campaign places on record its grave concern over the way the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning has conducted itself in processing the Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill 2026. The Committee invited stakeholders to appear before it and then failed to show up on the first day of the scheduled hearings. No adequate explanation was offered to those who had travelled and prepared submissions in good faith. On the second day, only a handful of Committee members joined online with a single Committee member physically present. 

Worse still, the Committee then collapsed submissions on three separate Bills, each with generational fiscal consequences, into a single session that barely took 3 hours. Why the rush? 

Recently, Parliament has processed the National Infrastructure Fund Act 2026, proposed amendments to the Public Finance Management Act, and amendments to the Public Audit Act. Taken together, these laws risk fundamentally restructuring how public resources are raised, managed, invested, and audited in Kenya, with key constitutional guardrails altered under conditions of deliberate haste and minimal scrutiny. 

The Constitution of Kenya does not provide for the appearance of public participation; it demands the substance of it. Article 118 obligates Parliament to facilitate meaningful public involvement in its legislative business. A poorly attended session that bundles three consequential Bills cannot, by any honest measure, satisfy that constitutional threshold. Stakeholders were not consulted. They were processed. The Okoa Uchumi Campaign categorically rejects this process as constitutionally inadequate and calls upon the Speaker of the National Assembly to take cognisance of this failure before the Committee’s report is tabled for debate. 

The pattern above did not begin with the Committee’s attendance record. It is part of a broader, accelerating trend of legislation designed to move fast precisely because speed outruns scrutiny. Parliamentary power is delegated power. The Constitution’s sovereign authority rests with the people, and it is the people’s interests this legislation must serve. 

OUR POSITION 

The Okoa Uchumi Campaign supports the establishment of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. We believe the timing is right and the need is urgent as Kenya seeks long-term financial stability, intergenerational savings, and protection against future economic shocks. However, such a Fund must be built through the right legal and policy process. 

Having reviewed the Bill against the Constitution of Kenya 2010, the Public Finance Management Act, the Conflict of Interest Act 2025, the Leadership and Integrity Act, and internationally recognised standards including the Santiago Principles for Sovereign Wealth Funds, we are compelled to state plainly: as currently drafted, the model proposed under this Bill is not a Sovereign Wealth Fund as globally understood. It risks becoming a hybrid fiscal vehicle combining the weakest governance features found in poorly governed funds in most Global South countries. 

The development of this Bill should have been preceded by a Sessional Paper, approved by the National Assembly, that clearly articulates the policy rationale, funding model, governance framework, and links the Fund to Kenya’s national development priorities and the National Interest under Article 203 of the Constitution. This critical foundational step has been skipped. A law dictates how a fund operates. A policy dictates why. Without the latter, the former is constitutionally deficient. 

The anchor of all public financial legislation is Article 201 of the Constitution, which mandates that public finance be guided by openness and equitable accountability. A legislative process that bypasses public policy debate does not merely cut corners, it violates the constitutional contract. 

OUR CONCERNS 

Before passing the Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill, Parliament has an obligation to the Kenyan people to provide clear, satisfactory answers to the following critical questions. 

1. What policy framework underpins this Bill? There is no Sessional Paper providing the broad policy architecture of the Fund, nor one explaining how it aligns with Kenya's national priorities and development agenda. Without this, Parliament is being asked to build an institution without a foundation.

2. Who truly controls the Fund? The Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill creates dangerous ambiguity around whether effective control rests with the Board, Cabinet, or the Cabinet Secretary. Ambiguity in public finance is not a drafting oversight; it is an open invitation to exploitation. The Cabinet Secretary should not hold withdrawal authority. That authority constitutionally belongs to the Controller of Budget. A fund controlled by a single executive office is not a Sovereign Wealth Fund, it is a political reserve. Statutory limits on executive discretion are non-negotiable. 

3. How will intergenerational savings be protected? The Bill lacks binding safeguards against random allocations, politically motivated withdrawals, and misuse of reserves. It makes vague reference to reporting obligations without guaranteeing disclosure, whether quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. It fails to require beneficial ownership disclosure of managers and contractors, or a real-time public dashboard on how funds are raised and utilized. Kenyans should be able to open their phones and see exactly where this money is going. If this Fund is truly for future generations, it must be transparent to the current generation. The Conflict-of-Interest Act 2025 demands that Politically Exposed Persons be screened and excluded from insider dealings through suppliers, proxies, and shell companies. This Bill ignores that entirely. 

4. What prevents political abuse? Without robust ring-fencing provisions, what stops this Fund from becoming an election-season cash reserve or an emergency fiscal tool during periods of political pressure? The Fund's Infrastructure Component risks becoming a backdoor for direct sourcing of mega-projects, repeating the procurement failures seen in Malaysia's 1MDB scandal and Kenya's own SGR financing arrangement. The Fund must be kept strictly subject to the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act. This is non-negotiable. 

5. How are counties and communities protected? Kenya is a devolved nation. You cannot build a national savings fund on the back of natural resources extracted from specific counties and then exclude those counties from the governance framework. The existing revenue-sharing formula of 70% to National Government, 20% to County Governments, and 10% to mining communities has already not been fully honored. The Senate must have a clearly defined oversight role, and county governments must be named stakeholders. Additionally, the Bill must clarify whether revenues from emerging resources such as carbon credits and green hydrogen fall within the scope of this Fund. Without this clarity, the Executive retains unilateral power to decide which next-generation resources escape public oversight entirely. 

6. What happens when things go wrong? Every institution eventually encounters failure. Does this Bill create accountability systems robust enough to detect abuse early, expose wrongdoing publicly, and enforce correction? These concerns are compounded by simultaneous attempts to weaken the Public Audit Act, undermining oversight mechanisms and the role of the Auditor General at the precise moment stronger accountability is most needed. 

These concerns do not arise in isolation, and one of the most glaring structural failures spans two Bills simultaneously before Parliament. Both the National Infrastructure Fund Act 2026 and the Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill 2026 allocate resources to infrastructure financing. The NIF was specifically established to fund strategic national infrastructure. Yet the SWF Bill simultaneously designates a “Strategic Infrastructure Investment Component” for the same purpose. This is not a complementary design but institutional duplication. Two separate funds, governed by different Boards with different accountability frameworks and objectives, will compete for the same project pipeline, fragment public investment oversight, and multiply the opportunities for off-budget spending. Parliament cannot credibly pass the SWF Bill without first resolving this fundamental overlap.

Citizens cannot be asked to tighten their belts while Parliament simultaneously creates opaque financial vehicles with weak accountability safeguards. Sovereignty cannot exist where accountability is absent. 

OUR DEMANDS 

The Okoa Uchumi Campaign calls on Parliament to: 

● Halt the progression of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill 2026 until a Sessional Paper is developed and subjected to meaningful, inclusive public participation, including consultations with extractive communities and host county governments. 

● Prioritize and ring-fence the Future Generations Component as the primary objective of the Sovereign Wealth Fund, with a constitutionally anchored minimum allocation of 50% of all Fund revenues. No withdrawal from this Component shall be permitted for a minimum of five years from the date of the Fund’s establishment, allowing sufficient time for capital preservation and investment growth before any drawdowns commence.

● Protect the independence and roles of oversight institutions, including the Controller of Budget and the Auditor General, from executive interference or circumvention. 

● Ensure counties and communities benefit equitably from national resource wealth, with the Senate accorded a clear statutory oversight role.

● Reject any provisions that create hidden contingent liabilities for future generations, including uncapped government guarantees under the National Infrastructure Fund. ● Amend the Bill to expressly ensure that any revenue surpluses accrued to the Fund shall 

be invested directly into the Future Generations Component and shall not, under any circumstances, be applied to debt servicing. The use of sovereign savings to service recurrent debt obligations is fiscally counterproductive and fundamentally contradicts the intergenerational equity mandate of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. 

● Prohibit the use of the Sovereign Wealth Fund for budgetary support in any form. The Bill as drafted contemplates immediate drawdowns to support recurrent government expenditure, a provision that fundamentally contradicts the foundational principles of sovereign wealth creation. A fund that begins withdrawals the moment it is established is not building wealth. It is recycling it. Budgetary support is the business of the national budget and the Consolidated Fund. It has no place in the Sovereign Wealth Fund. 

● Restructure the Board of the Sovereign Wealth Fund to eliminate executive capture. The roles of executive government and the Central Bank of Kenya nominees shall be reduced to non-voting, observer status with no veto powers whatsoever. In their place, the Board must incorporate substantive voting representation from the National Youth Council, nominees of the Senate, and nominees of the National Assembly, all of whom must be independent experts, not sitting legislators. A Fund that claims to serve future generations must include the voices of those generations in its governance. 

● Mandate that both the Sovereign Wealth Fund and the National Infrastructure Fund operate strictly within the existing Public Finance Management and Public Procurement legal frameworks, preventing the creation of a shadow Treasury.

● Require an independent constitutional audit of the SWF Bill with specific focus on Articles 201, 203, 206, 211, 228, 230, and 94(6) before being passed into law. 

● Commission an Intergenerational Impact Assessment for all investments across both Funds to ensure they deliver net-positive economic returns for Kenya's youth and do not disproportionately increase the next generation's future debt-to-income ratio. 

For more information, reach out to Mulayi Muni via email at Mulayi.muni@tisa.or.ke ******* 

The Okoa Uchumi campaign is a civil society platform committed towards working with stakeholders to resolve Kenya's public debt crisis. The campaign advocates for balanced and equitable budgets as a means of achieving debt sustainability and economic inclusion. The campaign seeks to bolster constitutional safeguards in public debt management and to push for the accountability of political leaders in public debt management.