Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-04-29
Category: ODA·개발금융 | Keywords: aid, budget, debt, governance, state
Power cuts were a regular feature of childhood in Nairobi. When the electricity failed, my father would gather our family by candlelight and draw. On one such evening, he sketched a woman: a baby strapped to her back, a water pot balanced on her head, a basket of provisions carried before her. “This,” he said, “is what women do. Round the clock. They provide coming and going.” It was a simple image. What it captured, however, was not simple: labour that never ceases, provision that is neither compensated nor counted, the work that keeps life going whether formal systems function or not.
The connection between that drawing and public finance did not arrive immediately. It came slowly, through study and practice. But it arrived: the darkness itself was fiscal. The failing electricity grid was the consequence of underinvestment, deferred maintenance and institutional dysfunction. These being choices recorded somewhere in budget lines that most citizens never see and are rarely invited to question.
Cover image of Governing public money (Latif, 2026)
The woman in the drawing, labouring without recognition or remuneration, was doing precisely the work that fiscal systems are built upon yet systematically exclude from their accounting. Governing public money opens with this image because it establishes what the book is fundamentally about: not fiscal law as a technical enterprise, but public money as a political one questioning who it is raised from, how it travels through the state, and in whose interest it ultimately lands.
The background that shapes the book
To understand why a book on public finance law written from Nairobi needs to begin with a candlelit drawing rather than a definition of fiscal federalism, it helps to understand what public finance has historically meant on this continent. When British colonial administrators arrived in Kenya in the late nineteenth century, they did not simply govern. They built a fiscal system.
Hut taxes and poll taxes were introduced not primarily to fund public services but to coerce African men into wage labour on settler farms and colonial infrastructure projects. If you had to pay a tax in cash, you had to earn cash; if you had to earn cash, you had to work for those who had it.
The revenue side of the colonial budget was thus from the outset a mechanism of economic reorganisation , designed to break subsistence economies and redirect African labour into the colonial productive circuit. The expenditure side was correspondingly skewed: roads were built to move commodities to ports, not to connect communities to one another; schools educated a narrow administrative class, not a general citizenry.
This is not distant history. When Kenya gained independence in 1963, it inherited the institutions, the legal frameworks, and in large part the administrative logic of this system. The Constitution changed. The treasury did not. The statutes governing taxation, borrowing, and public expenditure were retained, amended at the margins, and built upon. New governments operated through machinery whose foundational architecture had not been designed with African welfare as the organising priority .
As I put it in the book, “independence transferred political authority without fundamentally redistributing fiscal power.” This is the historical ground beneath the book’s argument. It is not background. It is constitutive.
You cannot understand why Kenya’s health budget is chronically underfunded while debt servicing consumes an expanding share of recurrent expenditure, or why the tax burden falls disproportionately on wage earners rather than capital, without understanding what kind of state the fiscal system was built to serve and whose interests it was built to protect.
The themes that tell the story
The book’s eleven chapters are constructed to accumulate rather than stand apart. I describe taxation, borrowing, expenditure, intergovernmental transfers, and international fiscal architecture as “spokes around a single wheel, and that wheel is public money.” Each chapter is a different angle on a single, continuous question: how does public money move, who decides its direction, and what does that tell us about the state’s actual priorities?
On taxation, the analysis goes well beyond rates and thresholds. Tax is framed as a claim on productive activity that reflects choices about which activities are visible to the state, whose wealth is assessable, and which burdens fall on wages rather than capital.
In Kenya, as across much of the continent, the salaried worker whose earnings are deducted at source before they ever reach a bank account bears a compliance burden that the wealthy investor, operating through corporate structures and cross-border arrangements, does not. This is not an accident of design. It is design.
On borrowing, the book argues that public debt is not merely a financing mechanism. It is a commitment that binds future public expenditure to creditor preferences, often circumventing the constitutional and parliamentary processes through which democratic societies are supposed to exercise collective judgment over collective resources. When a government borrows from international capital markets or multilateral institutions under conditions that specify fiscal targets, spending ceilings, or privatisation requirements, the annual budget – ostensibly the democratic instrument through which a parliament expresses the nation’s priorities – is already partially written before it is tabled.
Illustration by Abdul Latif (1995, copyright Abdul Latif)
One of the book’s most significant contributions is its recovery of the fiscal traditions that colonial administration buried. African indigenous fiscal mechanisms, that is, the communal governance systems through which communities managed shared resources and organised redistribution before colonial codification, did not disappear because they were intellectually inadequate. They were marginalised because a colonial administration required a different set of arrangements.
Equally, Islamic fiscal instruments that had governed economic relations across large parts of the continent for centuries, such as z akat as a wealth redistribution mechanism and w aqf as endowment-based public finance, were never incorporated into the post-colonial constitutional framework. Not because they lacked jurisprudential merit, but because the framework that independence inherited had been designed to exclude them.
Following the money, all the way
What makes this book timely is that it refuses the separation between doctrine and politics that most public finance textbooks take for granted. Reading a budget line requires knowing not just what the number says, but what legal obligation produced it, what treaty commitment constrains it, what intergovernmental formula determines how it is shared, and what political economy explains why it looks the way it does rather than some other way.
Adam Smith’s canonical inquiry into the wealth of nations was at its core a political economy question: how are resources generated, distributed, and governed, and with what consequences for human welfare? That question does not belong to any single tradition. African fiscal scholarship belongs in that conversation not as a regional footnote but as a substantive contributor with its own analytical categories, its own institutional histories, and its own stakes in the answers.
A Liberian proverb opens the book: “If your house don’t sell you, the streets won’t buy you.” The house is the fiscal compact between a state and its people. When that compact holds (when public money is genuinely raised from, allocated toward, and accounted for in the interest of those who generated it) governance becomes legitimate from within. That is where the book begins, and it ends in the same place: with the question of whether fiscal systems serve human flourishing. The most honest image of what that means is not found in a statute. It is a father’s candlelit drawing of a woman providing, uncounted and uncompensated, round the clock. Public finance should count her.