Public Debt Sustainability: Is Kenya's Debt-to-GDP Ratio a Cause for Concern?

A debt-to-GDP ratio below 70% sounds reassuring. But aggregate numbers hide critical structural risks: the proportion of external versus domestic debt, the currency composition, the maturity profile, and the revenue base used to service that debt. In this episode we break down Kenya's public debt stock as of the latest Treasury bulletin, examine debt service costs as a share of ordinary revenue, and ask whether the country's current trajectory is genuinely sustainable — or whether the IMF's debt sustainability analysis is systematically optimistic.