Kenya’s Court of Appeals issued a landmark ruling that dismissed the government’s decade-long effort to keep secret the $4.5 billion loan contracts with the China Exim Bank that were used to build the Standard Gauge Railway.
Friday’s ruling, made public on Tuesday, is a major setback for the State House, which asserted for years that the loan contracts were government-to-government arrangements that included strict non-disclosure clauses and therefore not subject to the country’s procurement laws, written into the constitution, that require such financing deals to be made public.
The court said the state had failed to make the case that disclosure of the SGR loan contracts would harm national security and injure foreign relations with China.
The verdict is a huge win for the two civil society activists who’ve been fighting this battle in court since 2019. This is actually the second major legal victory for Khelef Khalifa and Wanjiru Gikonyo on this issue, following the 2022 decision by the Mombasa High Court, which also ordered the government to release the contracts, and was the basis of this latest appeal.
Khalifa and Gikonyo have been outspoken over the years in accusing the government of rampant corruption during the building of the SGR that is now operational between the city of Naivasha in the Rift Valley and the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa.
The Chinese embassy in Nairobi has not commented on Friday’s ruling.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? William Ruto promised during his 2022 campaign that if elected, he would release the full SGR contracts. He didn’t. Instead, he released only a part of the deals but kept the most sensitive portions of the agreement locked away.
Now, in a critical test of the rule of law in Kenya, Ruto is, in theory, forced to fulfill that campaign promise. It’s just not clear, though, that he will.
Clearly, there is something in those contracts that Ruto, who was in government at the time when these deals were done, does not want the public to see; otherwise, why would they have fought for so long to keep these documents secret?
The China Exim Bank has been mum on the issue from the beginning, so it’s unclear how they will respond if the government follows through on the court’s order.
