In a kind of planned legislative ambush that could really, in a way, unhinge Kenya’s whole transport system, the Senate is pushing hard for a fresh amendment to grab almost half of the multi-billion-shilling Road Maintenance Levy Fund (RMLF) straight from national agencies.
What makes it feel so twisted is this sudden fiscal push, because it sets up the near-term balkanization of Kenya’s roads. With a demand for a fixed 49 percent share earmarked for county governments, the Senate is basically running a kind of structural starvation effort against national infrastructure heavyweights like KeNHA, KURA, and KeRRA.
If this proposal goes through, rerouting that pool of liquid tax money means the key economic lifelines connecting Nairobi to East African trade corridors will lose their emergency maintenance support so rural governors can pad local budgets.
This isn’t only paperwork or a quiet administrative tweak. It reads more like an infrastructural civil war. Right now the national government keeps a centralized monopoly on fuel levy distributions so the mega-highways don’t just stall out. However, the Senate’s bold action within the County Government’s Additional Allocations Bill completely overturns this notion.
Analysts are warning that siphoning hundreds of billions away from major highway corridors, during a period of record debt pressure, will likely make Kenya’s main transit network slide quickly into structural decay within just about the next two years.
“We are witnessing the death of centralized infrastructure planning,” a transport logistics analyst said. “The center will bleed so that counties can pave village pathways.”
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