Kenya’s Oil Export Overshadowed With Economic Gloom

Kenya’s Economy is suffering , you would have to have been living in a whole the last couple of years to not know this. This is because of the incompetent government elected into office! The country is recording major retrogression into dark ‘second president’ regime times. Kenyans’ financial situation is worse off even after the country made 9 million euros from the sale of 240,000 barrels of oil produced at the Turkana oilfields (KNBS).

The country may well be paying more than it earned to meet the costs of transporting the oil to a terminal in Mombasa County where it is exported. Tullow Oil, Kenya’s partner, is also eager to start recovering the over 1.8 billion euros it invested in exploration operations alone, an indication that Kenyans will have to wait for a while longer before being enjoying ‘oil money’.

Although Kenya has earned its first billion shillings from oil exports, analysts say the milestone has been overshadowed by a cloud of economic gloom. The first billion shillings was deposited into a sovereign fund opened at the treasury from where it will be managed along the lines of Kenya’s normal formula for the sharing of the budget.

Petroleum principal secretary Andrew Kamau breaks it down that 75 pc goes to the national government, 20 pc to county governments and 5 pc to communities.

Despite the sale, Kenya has been pulled down by mounting public debt and reduced savings among its workforce plagued by job cuts, stagnant wages in a business environment where companies have ushered in austerity measures to protect profits. As at September 2019 our public and publicly guaranteed stock of debt amounted to Sh5.96 trillion which is 63.9 percent of GDP weighted on nominal GDP of Sh9.32 trillion as at June 2019.

Moses Ikiara, the executive director of the Kenya investment authority (Keninvest) has however expressed optimism that the windfall accruing from oil sales will strengthen Kenya’s affirmative action in terms of development