Kenya's Central Bank withdrew Sh1.3 trillion between July 2024 and February 2025 without using the country's digital financial management system, leaving no electronic trail for funds equivalent to nearly a quarter of the national budget.
The withdrawals bypassed the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), which was specifically designed to create transparency and prevent exactly this kind of untracked movement of public funds. Controller of Budget Margaret Nyakang'o flagged the practice in her report to Parliament, noting that Sh893 billion alone went to public debt payments, with additional billions allocated to pensions and recurrent government expenses.
"These lump-sum withdrawals have no breakdown, and tracking is impossible," Nyakang'o told parliamentary oversight committees. The transactions were authorized by what official documents describe as an "unknown individual" signing manual withdrawal forms at the Central Bank.
The Treasury defended the practice, claiming IFMIS automation remained "incomplete" during the period and that "no funds were lost." But that defense obscures the core accountability issue: seven months of government spending left no digital footprint.
IFMIS was introduced precisely to prevent the kind of opacity that characterized Kenya's public finances for decades. The system requires electronic authorization, creates automatic audit trails, and makes it significantly harder for funds to disappear between withdrawal and intended use. Manual withdrawals circumvent all of these safeguards.
"They built a watchdog system, then turned off the lights," said Dr. Wanjiru Gikonyo, a public finance analyst at the University of Nairobi. "If the automation was incomplete, the responsible action would have been to complete it urgently or maintain enhanced manual oversight. Instead, they chose to operate in the shadows."
The amounts involved dwarf many county budgets. Nairobi County's entire annual budget is approximately Sh40 billion. The untracked Central Bank withdrawals represent funding equivalent to 32 Nairobi-sized jurisdictions, moved with less documentation than a shopkeeper provides for a bag of sugar.
The timing coincides with mounting public debt obligations and persistent questions about Kenya's ability to meet loan repayments while maintaining social services. Debt service consumed 57 percent of government revenue in the 2023/24 fiscal year, forcing cuts to health, education, and infrastructure.
Opposition legislators seized on the revelations. "This is how scandals begin," said Junet Mohamed, a member of Parliament's Finance Committee. "Today it's incomplete automation. Tomorrow it's where did the money go? We've seen this script before."
The Controller of Budget's office has requested full documentation of the manual transactions, including the identities of authorizing officials and detailed breakdowns of how funds were distributed after leaving the Central Bank. As of publication, those details have not been provided.
Treasury officials insist the manual system was temporary and that IFMIS integration has since been completed. But seven months of public spending without digital oversight raises questions that bureaucratic explanations cannot fully answer: Who authorized these transactions? Why was system completion not prioritized? And most critically, where exactly did Sh1.3 trillion go?
In a country where taxpayers are increasingly asked to shoulder higher costs through new levies and taxes, the revelation that trillions moved through government accounts with no electronic record erodes already fragile public trust.
54 countries, 2,000 languages, 1.4 billion people. In Kenya, they're still learning that transparency delayed is transparency denied.
