Why spending is the elephant in the room

It is 25 years since I was first involved in analysing Kenya’s national budget. In days past, nobody talked about public spending; our eyes and ears were focused on tax proposals. Everyone viewed the Finance minister’s “budget briefcase” as a magical mix between a “Pandora’s Box” and “Aladdin’s Lamp” of tax woes and wishes; few were interested in the expenditure debit side as the basis for these taxes.

That’s all changed now. Expenditure and debt are the big news these days. Tax continues, like death, to be an inconvenient truth, and much of the better analysis I read these days comes from the big law firms, not just the accountants. With our 2010 constitution, Parliament makes the budget; Treasury is a data secretariat. If we had gone ‘full monty’ on our US-style constitution, that secretariat role might have been for an Office of Management and Budget located in the Presidency (wasn’t there an idea like that a while back?)