The Price of a First-World Dream

Hello 👋🏽 It's Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.

In today's newsletter, Kenya's zeal for funds remains without doubt. The cabinet has approved the creation of another one; this time, intended to pool trillions to fuel President Ruto's Singapore dream…

Here are our stories for the day…

The Price of a First-World Dream 

By Brian Nzomo

President William Ruto has been rather obsessed with the idea of Kenya becoming a first world country. That goal needs money…but where is it? The government’s answer now appears to be a KSh 5 trillion National Infrastructure Fund, a financial contraption designed to conjure capital at a moment when public debt has swollen past KSh 12 trillion and development spending is thin. By promising that every shilling of state money can somehow pull ten more from pension funds, private investors, and foreign partners, the Fund reads more like a wager on confidence. It is an admission, quietly embedded in policy, that the Treasury no longer has the cash to build dams, railways, and highways on its own. Whether this ambitious kitty becomes a catalyst for growth or another monument to fiscal desperation will depend on how much money actually shows up, and how little of it disappears 💀.

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In Dollars we trust

By Harry Njuguna

Kenyan investors have learned, often the hard way, that the fastest way to lose money is to hold it in the wrong currency. ALP Industrial REIT’s decision to raise US$30 million in dollars, while building warehouses on Kenyan soil, reads like a quiet confession about where trust now lies. The logistics parks at Tilisi and Tatu City promise steady rent, but the real attraction is that those rents are imagined in greenbacks rather than shillings. By limiting the offer to institutions and professionals, the REIT speaks to a narrow audience that understands currency risk instinctively. In a market shaped by inflation scars and exchange-rate anxiety, the safest buildings are increasingly the ones priced in someone else’s money.

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Snapshot 

Briefs

⚒️ Amsons Group's subsidiary Bamburi Cement signed a KSh 32Billion contract with SINOMA-CBMI to build a 1.6 million-tonne-per-year clinker plant in Matuga, Kwale. The investment is part of a larger KSh 51Billion, 3-year commitment and the plant aims to achieve clinker self-sufficiency and support Kenya's Affordable Housing Programme.

💡 Kenya has signed a US$ 311 million power transmission deal, about KSh 40.26 billion, with Africa50 and India’s PowerGrid Corporation to build two high-voltage electricity lines under a public-private partnership. The project will be developed and operated over a 30-year concession, with KETRACO as the contracting entity, as the government turns to private capital amid high debt and limited fiscal space.

🇳🇬 Aliko Dangote has intensified his dispute with Nigeria’s downstream oil regulator, accusing officials of allowing cheap fuel imports that undercut domestic refining. Speaking at his 650,000-barrel-per-day Lagos refinery, Dangote warned imports risk jobs, investment and energy security. He called for an official probe into the regulator’s leadership, saying policy failures distort refinery capacity and block crude supply meant for local processors.

OPINION: A Journey Into Supply-Chain Vulnerability- Lessons From a Nairobi Investigation

By John Andrew Musundi

An investigation began with a small, stubborn mismatch between the fuel loaded at the depot and what arrived at the delivery point. What seemed like a routine check quickly turned odd as the team noticed early departures, slow detours, and the same unexplained stops repeating night after night. None of these moments looked serious on their own, but together they hinted at a system that had grown too predictable and too easy to bend. It became clear that the problem wasn’t a single act of wrongdoing but a chain of small behaviours that had gone unchallenged for too long.

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