Setting the record straight

SHA had a genuinely difficult transition, and the President has said so publicly. But the comparison being made is not an honest one.

NHIF covered a minority of Kenyans, was chronically insolvent and was drained by claim fraud. SHA has registered more than 29 million Kenyans — the widest coverage in Kenyan history — and has been settling around Sh13 billion a month to hospitals, roughly what NHIF collected in six months.

It also covers what NHIF never adequately did: dialysis, oncology, ICU and emergency care through the Emergency, Chronic and Critical Illness Fund, with the poorest households covered at no cost.

Abuse of Kenyan workers abroad is real, and the government has never denied it. The response has been to regulate the channel rather than pretend the demand does not exist.

540,000 Kenyans have been placed through government-to-government bilateral agreements with Germany, the UK, Austria, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — contracts registered before departure, vetted agencies only, and labour attachés in destination countries.

The alternative to a regulated channel is not zero migration; it is unregulated trafficking, which is exactly what produced the abuse cases in the first place. Remittances have risen by about $1 billion a year as a result.

The largest single revenue gain of this administration came from digitisation, not taxation. Consolidating government payments onto one rail lifted monthly collections from Sh1.45 billion to Sh10.9 billion — a 652% increase — without a single new tax. That is revenue citizens already owed, which now reaches the exchequer instead of leaking.

The government also withdrew the Finance Bill 2024 in full after public objection, which is the opposite of a government that taxes regardless of consent.