NAIROBI: Last week it was the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This week it was the World Bank. And their message to the Government of Kenya is the same - your borrowing is becoming too much.

It is now official that we do not have the luxury of voraciously taking loans as we have been doing because, as the World Bank puts it, the space for manoeuvering is “rapidly narrowing”.

“With an over 13 percentage point of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio within a three-year period, and with debt levels over 50 per cent of GDP, and fiscal deficits well above the medium term 4.5 per cent target, the fiscal policy space is fast eroding and margins for further debt accumulation are narrowing,” warned the World Bank in its latest report on Kenya.

In less than three years, the country’s external debt has increased five-fold from Sh361.73 billion in May 2003 to Sh1.8 trillion as at June this year. In total, the country’s public debt stands at around Sh3.2 trillion.

This is worrying.

This newspaper has said it before: there is nothing wrong with borrowing, but if we really have to take loans then let us do it prudently and give the taxpayer value.

In some instances, we are borrowing to settle other loans as revenue collection fails to catch up with public expenditure. Or worse, the funds are lost in our bureaucratic maze famed for lethargy and grotesque inefficiency.

And therein lies the rub.

True, Kenya’s debt is far from the scary levels of the likes of Ghana but it is steadily rolling towards the red zone.

We are certainly living beyond our means and every dollar that is borrowed, either locally or internationally, adds to the debt mountain.

The Jubilee government has undertaken numerous ambitious infrastructural projects, including the construction of the Sh327 billion Standard Gauge Railway, which has seen expenditure exceed the country’s revenues.

The International Monetary Fund says these mega projects that include highways, power plants, sea ports and airports are not necessarily bad.

In fact, they will see the country’s Gross Domestic Product jump to a high of 6.8 per cent, a 0.3 per cent rise from last year.

Surely, this is encouraging given that most African economies have chugged along after the collapse of commodity prices.

Indeed, there is no country in the world that can earn bragging rights for being debt-free.

However, we need to check our borrowing or at least try to live within our means, say, by cutting down on non-essential expenditure, reining in corruption and rigorously collecting revenues.

As the IMF noted, Kenya is among the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa with “unexploited tax potential”.

There is room for increasing the tax base by extending the tax net to the informal sector and sealing the holes used by tax cheats.