The sinkhole that is government spending
Opinion
By
Mutahi Mureithi
| Mar 08, 2026
I sometimes watch nature documentaries, and I recently saw one that ventured into the murky area of quicksand and sinkholes.
The former engulfs you ever so slowly and, unless some help comes along fast, your fate is doomed.
The latter is worse. It appears out of nowhere: you are on terra firma one second, and the next, you are plunging into a deep hole that only the good Lord can get you out.
And if he blinks while at it, that will be the last time your people will hear of you.
We have many such freaks of ‘nature’ in this country, especially within government, where money from the Treasury tends to find its way into a sinkhole.
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Let’s start with the highest office in the land: the State House. I have no idea where Treasury’s allocation ends up for this esteemed institution. Or maybe I do. We all do, actually. I have seen reports stating that the allocation for the house on the hill has more than doubled to over Sh18 billion.
This, we were told, was a special allocation that did not need approval. Reports say it is one of the highest allocations in the world for running a state house or the residency of the high and mighty.
Even US President Donald Trump apparently pales in comparison with our own when it comes to expenditure in the White House. There is something very wrong with this.
In today’s Kenya, a billion shillings has lost meaning. It’s just another figure that does not jolt us into thinking about what such money can do.
At least it doesn’t for the moneyed elite. For the rest of us, we can’t even fathom how much a billion is. If you laid out Sh1,000 notes end to end, starting from Nairobi, you would only run out of banknotes somewhere past Nakuru.
If you did the same with Sh18 billion, you would build a highway of notes from Mombasa, through Nakuru, over to Kisumu, Kampala, and way past Kigali in Rwanda.
In other words, a billion is a lot of money. I still remember that time last year when I visited this school in Nakuru, where half the kids from neighbouring settlements walk around in rags literally and, for those lucky enough to have a semblance of shoes, they adorn dissimilar shoes, sometimes even in colour and size.
As for school lunch, most go without lunch (which costs Sh30) simply because they can’t afford.
Were it not for philanthropists such as the Gilanis in the particular case of Nakuru, these kids would not be in school. Let’s engage in some basic arithmetic.
Feeding lunch to 2,000 children at Sh30 a meal amounts to Sh60,000 a day, or Sh1.2 million for a month (assuming a five-day-a-week school attendance).
Now, the State House is spending almost Sh50 million a day! Can you imagine how many mouths the extra allocation would have fed?
Not too long ago, we were told that an event outside the State House costs over Sh120 million.
I still can’t get my head around these figures. I am not sure to what end these functions serve, but assuming that we must have them, should we be spending this kind of money?
Can we do something for posterity, such as ensuring that that kid from Bondeni primary makes it to university and pulls his or her family, by the roots, out of poverty? What is so difficult about this?
Can we perhaps think of building some schools in those areas where the children are still studying under trees? Can we provide them with proper sanitation?
I recently saw a primary school that has over 1,000 kids with an ablution block that can barely accommodate two dozen kids.
These are the things that will define a government’s legacy, not hopping from one county to the next on newly acquired choppers dishing out 500 bob handouts to scrawny scallywags who then make a beeline to the ‘mama pima’ who is known to dispense moonshine to the thirsty souls. Such is our country.
The writer is a communications consultant
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