National Treasury CS nominee John Mbadi has explained how Kenyans will be able to tell if they are paying real or fictitious debts.
Mbadi committed to making public the national debts, if approved to the docket.
“I don’t want to use real or fake but I talked about public debt accountability. I am committing to must try to make this a statutory document so that every Kenyan knows how much we owe, to who and at what cost,” he said.
On debt management, the former ODM chair said that he would restructure the country’s debt portfolios.
“We must manage our liability. We have to restructure our debts. If you look at how our debt was structured, especially external debt in 2010, we had 66% of that debt under multi-lateral which are concessionally loans and only 4% on commercial debts.
“We moved to a point where 31% in 2020 was commercial debt, averaging interest rate is 8-9%, that is not sustainable for an economy. It is now coming down, it is 23%. My focus is to have commercial debts at no more than 5% of our external debt portfolio and have 75% under multilateral debts and only 20% or there about under bilateral debt with that you can clearly reduce the cost of debt,” he explained
He also explained how he would address the issue of pending bills.
“Pending bills on this a serious matter. I think it is something that we need to agree on. With the qual basis of accounting, we will not be talking about pending bills cos there will be no cut off, any pending bill will be moved to the next financial year and paid but these pending bills, a lot of them are also fictitious. I know there is a committee in place and I don’t want to criticize it.
“We need to have a system where there is nothing like pending bills verification because it has become of failing to pay pending bills that are existent,” he said.
