Count the Debts First: Ichung'wah's Plan to Close Six Agencies Hides Unpaid SalariesCount the Debts First: Ichung'wah's Plan to Close Six Agencies Hides Unpaid Salaries

That is the flaw at the centre of the Regional Development Authorities Laws (Repeal) Bill, 2026, sponsored by Majority Leader Kimani Ichung'wah.

Its memorandum says implementation is not expected to need additional public spending, yet the Bill moves the authorities' liabilities, loans, credit facilities and pending court cases to a Treasury department without a single figure attached. Closing the agencies may well be right.

Doing it before the ledger is published is not, and the National Assembly should refuse to vote until it is.

A clean exit that carries unpaid salaries

The six bodies are the Kerio Valley, Lake Basin, Tana and Athi Rivers, Coast, Ewaso Ng'iro North and Ewaso Ng'iro South development authorities. Between them they have run irrigation schemes, dams, water projects and land holdings for decades.

As Mwenendo reported, their rights, obligations, assets and liabilities would all vest in the Treasury once the law takes effect, and no monetary value for any of it has been made public.

The little evidence on the record points the wrong way.

At a hearing before the National Assembly's Departmental Committee on Regional Development in August, the Tana and Athi Rivers Development Authority (TARDA) reported KSh 176.9M ($1.36M) in recurrent pending obligations for January to June 2026 alone, including unpaid salaries and unremitted staff deductions.

An agency that cannot meet its payroll is not a body whose closure costs nothing. It is a body whose bills are about to change address.

TARDA's managing director, Liban Duba, told the same committee that dissolution "should not transfer the burden of institutional financial constraints to employees". He is right, and the logic runs further: the burden should not quietly transfer to taxpayers either, at least not without Parliament knowing its size.

Kerio Valley shows the kind of liability that hides

The best argument for counting first is the history of the Kerio Valley Development Authority (KVDA).

The authority was the respondent when three Italian contractors, led by CMC di Ravenna, filed an arbitration claim of KSh 14.81B ($114.1M) over the cancelled Arror and Kimwarer dams, two projects once budgeted at about KSh 63B ($485.32M).

The government later announced a deal with Italy to revive the dams and withdraw the court cases, but the public has never seen a full accounting of what the State still owes, or is owed, on those projects.

That is precisely the kind of obligation a repeal Bill sweeps up. Contracts, guarantees, insurance arrangements and arbitration claims do not disappear when an agency does. Under this Bill they simply become Treasury business, read in every contract as if the successor department had signed it.

If a claim of that size sits anywhere in the six authorities' books, Kenyans deserve to know before their representatives approve the transfer, not after the first demand letter arrives at Treasury Building.

The point is not that KVDA's past dictates the other five authorities' balance sheets. Mwenendo has no evidence that it does. The point is that the Bill gives Parliament no way to tell.

The strongest case for closing them still needs a price

The case for the Bill deserves a fair hearing. Since 2010 the Constitution has placed much of what these authorities do, from water services to local agriculture, under county governments. Duplicated mandates waste money, blur accountability and give politicians extra boards to fill.

The Bill's own memorandum says the authorities have substantially achieved their original objectives, and it protects staff by moving them to the Public Service Commission on terms no less favourable than their current ones, with continuous service counted for pensions.

Those are serious arguments, and Mwenendo does not dispute that some of these agencies have outlived their purpose. But efficiency is a claim about money, and a claim about money can be tested only with numbers. A reform sold as easing pressure on public finances must show three figures at minimum: what the six authorities owe, what they own, and what it will cost to wind them up. The Bill shows none.

Even the government is not of one mind. The State Department for ASALs and Regional Development told MPs in August that the authorities' statutory mandates "should not be abolished" and asked for a 12-month transition with a plan due within 60 days.

Committee chairperson Peter Lochakapong said the Bill's proponents "may not have adequately consulted the employees". When the ministry responsible for the agencies is asking for more time, the claim that closure is cost-free looks less like analysis and more like hope.

The debt pile this would land on

The timing makes the omission harder to excuse. Mwenendo has reported that Treasury projections show public debt rising by KSh 1.35T ($10.43B) in 2027/28 while Kenya's next IMF programme still has no start date. Adding unpriced agency liabilities to that pile, however small they turn out to be, is the opposite of the fiscal discipline the Bill claims to serve.

There is also a pattern here that should worry anyone who has ever invoiced the State. Mwenendo's analysis of Standard Group found a private company pointing to a government debt backlog of more than seven years.

A Treasury department that inherits the unpaid suppliers of six agencies will join a long queue of creditors the State already struggles to pay. Contractors, farmers on irrigation schemes and retirees of these authorities are entitled to know where they stand in that queue.

The vote Parliament should withhold

Responsibility here is clear. Mr Ichung'wah, as sponsor, owes the House a full schedule of the liabilities his Bill transfers.

The Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury, whose department becomes the successor, should table the six authorities' latest audited accounts, a list of every loan, guarantee and pending court case, and an estimate of winding-up costs.

The Departmental Committee on Regional Development, which takes public views in Kilifi, Kisumu and Embu on 23 October, should make that schedule a condition of its report.

None of this blocks reform. It asks only that Kenya does what any buyer of a business does before signing: read the books. If the liabilities are as modest as the Bill implies, publishing them costs nothing and wins the argument. If they are not, Parliament will have learnt it in time.

Close the agencies if the numbers support it. But a Bill that promises no new spending while handing the Treasury an unpriced bundle of debts is asking MPs to take that promise on trust, and on Kerio Valley's record, trust is not an accounting standard.