Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah blasts the World Bank over Kenya’s hidden borrowing scandal.

By Probe International

Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah has unleashed a blistering attack on the World Bank, accusing it of shedding “crocodile tears” over corruption in Kenya while conveniently ignoring the far bigger scandal of hidden borrowing and the looting of public funds.

In a formal and fiery statement issued to the press on November 10, the outspoken senator tore into the lender’s latest Kenya Economic Update released earlier in the month. By zeroing in on procurement graft, he charged, the Bank is deliberately looking the other way on its own role in what he calls a massive “heist” — specifically billions in Kenyan taxpayer money and borrowed resources that Omtatah says are being accessed and spent through hidden loans outside Parliament’s oversight.

“Though most welcome, the World Bank’s sea of crocodile tears, on the opportunity cost of corruption on Kenyans, is inviting us to look only at the lesser evil – procurement – which is theft on the expenditure side of the equation where the institution plays absolutely no role, allowing the bank, which is totally complicit in the heist, to hide in open view,” Omtatah declared.

He insists the real action is on the revenue side: billions in loans allegedly contracted without clear expenditure lines in the Appropriations Acts passed by Parliament. These arrangements, he argues, let the National Treasury and the World Bank bypass ordinary constitutional controls.

Omtatah zeroed in on the Bretton Woods Agreements Act (Cap 464), especially Sections 3, 4 and 5, which he says create a closed system allowing payments to the IMF and World Bank to be charged directly on the Consolidated Fund without fresh parliamentary appropriation. He also slammed the World Bank’s legal immunities under Article VII of its Articles of Agreement, claiming they make the lender almost untouchable.

He urged ordinary Kenyans to do the math themselves: “Just compare any year’s Appropriations Act with copies of the National Treasury’s monthly online publication called Statement of Actual Revenue and Net Expenditure Issues issued in the same year, and the looting of public funds through hidden loans not tied to any projects approved by Parliament will hit you in the face.”

Omtatah’s latest blast at the World Bank is the political sequel to the high-stakes “odious debt” court case that economist Patricia Adams warned lenders about in August.

In her Financial Post analysis, Adams highlighted a petition filed by Omtatah and eight co-petitioners. A three-judge Nairobi High Court bench had just greenlit a full hearing on roughly US$54 billion of public debt (with special focus on about US$7.1 billion in Eurobonds raised under Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto).

The core claims match the classic odious-debt test. Adams noted that the Central Bank of Kenya even sided with the petitioners, calling the issues of “undoubted public importance.” She warned that a ruling branding any of the debt odious would create the first major African judicial precedent on the doctrine—putting lenders on notice that loans made outside normal parliamentary channels and held offshore may not be fully enforceable.

Related Reading

Omtatah’s Odious-Debt Puts Kenya’s Political Lenders—And Its Political Class—On Notice

Lenders, Beware — a Kenyan Court Case May Invalidate ‘Odious Debts’