SAM’S SENSE: Numbers: Gov't-to-Govt clash

For two weeks now, the country has been embroiled in a debate. A debate about statistics released by the government statistician, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, that the country grew at a declining rate of 4.6 per cent.

Here, many have had an opinion. From disputing the figures and the interpretation by media outlets, to using the data to conveniently shape narratives.

Let me begin with the size of the economy. The recently transmitted budget estimates for the 2026/2027 financial year suggest that the economy is now at more than Ksh.20.8 trillion in size.

This figure is important because it is based on it that several factors are measured. One of them is the budget deficit-to-GDP ratio. This is a metric the government uses to make a case for increased borrowing. It is calculated by taking the budget gap or deficit and dividing it by the GDP. If the GDP is higher, you have a more appealing rate.

And then there is the public debt-to-GDP ratio, which I will illustrate shortly.

Now, the National Treasury imagines that the country’s GDP for purposes of the national budget is Ksh.20.8 trillion. But the National Bureau of Statistics just put it at Ksh.17.6 trillion. That is a difference of Ksh. 3 trillion.

You see, the law requires the government to lower the ratio of public debt to GDP to 55 per cent by mid-2028. Where are we now? At a debt estimate of Ksh.12.6 trillion, this is 71.5 per cent of the GDP, based on the KNBS data. If the same debt figure is matched against the GDP of Ksh.20.8 trillion as per the National Treasury, that proportion falls to 60 per cent.

Whose figure should we use? And why is there a difference in the first place? And when the National Treasury continues to pile up the public debt with more expenditure and declared deficits, what is the plan?

Secondly, when a government invests taxpayers’ money in a government agency to count, where do politicians find the strength to generate their own contrarian data? Simple things like counting how many bags of maize were produced in a year — why should it be a source of arguments?

Yet, in the spirit of learning how to count what we want, the Ministry of Education shows up one Monday morning with an expression of shock that certain senior schools are charging fees beyond the guidelines.

A very innocent shock, when schools have been doing it for years.

Then you learn that in every school board, the ministry is represented in the hierarchy of leadership down to the sub-county level. But let’s be shocked and absorb it, then order for an investigation.

A counting nation that has no idea how much it costs to educate a Kenyan child from early childhood to higher education. How school capitation is an official figure but not necessarily to be followed. Nobody knows how much money out of the declared capitation per learner effectively makes it to schools.

And while students strive to learn statistics better than the adults, the counting problem evolves in the health sector. Simple measurements like how many of us are registered under the Social Health Authority.

When figures of 30 million subscribers are announced by those in government, only for the statistics bureau to report that 20.9 million were registered based on their source. Who is the source, you may ask? The Social Health Authority. But then registration continues, and so does the counting.

And so there is a pattern: exaggerate the numbers — be it textbooks distributed to schools, money released to schools, money paid to hospitals and whatever else sounds good.

But when the Controller of Budget or the Auditor General reports that certain institutions spent more money outside the budget or on non-priority areas, every politician jolted by such must discount the figures and assign names. From sponsored headlines, to terming them unverified figures, to the politicisation of government expenditure and more.

Perhaps the country needs an urgent meeting. We could call it a National Conference on National Statistics.

Because for public discourse to regain its credibility, a country must be spot on with data. Different sources can have different figures; the value is in the verifiability of such data and the formulae used.

If we cannot speak to the same issues with credible data, maybe there is no sense in citing figures.

Because then it becomes just a game, an exchange over who is right or wrong, a fact-checker game.

And therein we lose the value that data brings to decision-making.