Mbadi's double speak: CS now says NIF a Fund, not limited company
Business
By
Esther Dianah and Macharia Kamau
| Mar 05, 2026
Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has stated that the National Infrastructure Fund (NIF) is a financing vehicle, and not a limited liability company.
He explained that the fund, which is a concept, had two options: either create a national infrastructure fund or a limited liability company.
“The other option, and where I belong, was to create a Fund with a proper legal framework,” Mbadi said, noting there is no contradiction.
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As such, he explained that the government made a decision to set up a fund through a legislative Bill, which is currently in Parliament. This decision, Mbadi said, was to prevent deceitful individuals from registering a similar name.
“You cannot register the National Infrastructure Fund as an investment entity. So we moved ahead to secure that and register the fund, but it was not conclusively registered,” he said.
“I was not under any obligation to tell anybody that we had reserved the name. I was just warning the people who had thought of registering the National Infrastructure Fund that we had already registered it,” Mbadi defended his stance, distancing himself from reports that the NIF is an investment entity. “So how does it contradict?” Mbadi was speaking on Wednesday during the announcement of the Kenya Pipeline Company’s Initial Public Offer (IPO) results.
The Kenya Pipeline Company’s IPO hit a subscription rate of 105 per cent, attracting Sh112 billion against the target of Sh106.3 billion, despite a slow start that necessitated a three-day extension.
Treasury said it would not exercise a green shoe option of retaining the excess amount but would instead refund the Sh5 billion.
KPC will on Monday start trading at the Nairobi Securities Exchange and is expected to be among the largest counters by market capitalisation at the bourse.
Focus now shifts to the yet-to-be-established NIF, where a proportion of the IPO proceeds are expected to be deposited as seed capital that will, in turn, attract Sh5 trillion from private sector players for major infrastructure projects.
However, existing only in concept and not yet fully operational, the government intends to safeguard the fund using proceeds from the KPC IPO of Sh106 billion.
The IPO was largely supported by institutional investors from Kenya and the region. Local institutional investors will hold 41 per cent of KPC, while those from the region – including Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) – will have a 21.22 per cent stake. Kenyan retail shareholders will hold 2.56 per cent, foreign investors 0.02 per cent, KPC employees 0.06 per cent, while the Treasury will retain 35 per cent. Oil marketers have been allocated 0.014 per cent of the total offer.
Mbadi said the oversubscription demonstrated investor confidence in the government’s privatisation agenda, despite earlier concerns about valuation and timing.
“The KPC IPO is coming 17 years after the Safaricom IPO in 2008, which was the last listing by the Government of Kenya,” he said, noting that the IPO’s success came amid “loud whispers about overvaluation of the shares, with some pessimists predicting doom”.
He dismissed claims of overvaluation as propaganda, arguing that institutional investors with access to better valuation tools had oversubscribed their allocation three times.
Part of the Sh106.7 billion raised through the IPO, together with the Sh245 billion expected from the partial sale of the government’s stake in Safaricom, will be used to set up the NIF. There are, however, concerns that the Fund has yet to be formally established, amid contradictions from Mbadi himself. In January, he told Parliament that the Fund had been established as a limited liability company. However, in papers filed at the Milimani High Court, Mbadi said this had not happened.
“In the meantime, if money comes, it will go into the Consolidated Fund, so there will be no problem, and for the money to get to the NIF it will have to be appropriated by MPs,” he said.