SGR is long term investment. Ndii want gov to just engage in short investment like it will report profit and loss. SGR that you deride will last 200yrs. The British one that was derided created Nairobi (out of Railway station) and nearly all Kenya cities bar Mombasa - and entire economy is line along that old British line. That is what infrastructure do to a country in 50-100yrs.
Jubilee yes grew debt - but we also got infrastructure that will outlast the present generation.
And Jubilee to it's credit has never sold any public asset.
Kibaki kept borrowing to the minimum by SELLING PUBLIC Asset. There are 3 ways to finance budget - raise taxes - sell public assets - or borrow.
Kibaki sold 30% of Safaricom. If Jubilee was to sell 30% of Safaricom that is 4b dollars - and that is enough to finance SGR.
Kimunya was just busy selling public sector companies - 30% of KENGEN, 30% of KenRe, 30% of Mumias, 30% of Safaricom, Telkom Kenya, name it.
The stock market grew, everyone was happy, but remember we were selling assets built by last generation, to mostly finance recurrent budget.
This I believe is very stupid. We need to sell such assets and invest in long term infrastructure like railways. Did Kibaki build Safaricom - nope - Moi did - but he sold it and finance his gov budget with it.
Jubilee 1.0 was busy laying the mines that are currently sabotaging KE economy Zambia style. Look at these graphs. We borrowed recklessly, GDP is a useless metric, you can have positive GDP growth while people are starving, jobs are being shed, and economy is in the doldrums. Building useless infrastructure to nowhere can bump up the GDP, which is misleading as it only captures volume, not value. We were busy taking on Chinese goods and services on credit which immediately started eating away at our income. China on the other hand, manufactures its capital goods, hence its infrastructure and other capital investments stimulate and create jobs domestically. This point escapes Pundit who thinks ALL infrastructure projects are created equal.