While speaking to Reuters two years ago, the Auditor General, Edward Ouko said the country was losing a third of its budget to corruption annually. Going by the recently unveiled Sh 3 trillion budget, Kenyans will lose slightly over Sh 333 billion in the 2018/19 financial year.
The money we expect to lose in this financial year can build us fully fledged National Referral hospitals in all the 45 counties that depend on Kenyatta National Hospital (Nairobi) and Moi Teaching and Referral hospital (Eldoret) at a cost of Sh 2 billion each complete with state of the art cancer treatment centers also at Sh 2 billion each.
And the government will still have enough money to connect 7,500,000 Kenyans with electricity at a cost of Sh 135 billion (by last mile project-phase one estimates); build three Super Highways at cost of Sh 27 billion each and still remain with Sh 500, 000 pocket change.
That’s what corruption is going to rob us this financial year. And there’s little reason to expect otherwise.
The country has already lost circa Sh 23 billion from January to May this year over just four scandals: NYS season II (Sh 9 billion); Hazina Towers (Sh 11.5 billion); Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) Sh 6.3 billion; Kenya Pipeline (Sh 647 million), and the Timber scandal costing the public another Sh 2 billion.
In short, in between January to May this year we lost money that could’ve built 479 state of the art high schools similar to the famous Mbagathi Girls high school in Kibra constituency at the same cost the school was built using the CDF cash. That is opportunity for about 230,000 students who otherwise study in unconducive environments and are likely to fail their Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) because of this.
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