Kenya’s budget briefcase revisited

Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani at Treasury building on his way to present the Financial Year 2021/2022 budget at Parliament Buildings, Nairobi. June 10, 2021. [Jonah Onyango, Standard]

It is perhaps one of the most nostalgic photos for most ministers of finance whenever they walk out of the Treasury building on Budget Day.

Tomorrow, Treasury CS Ukur Yatani will not perform the complete budget ritual if he alights from the limousine minus the budget briefcase.

 To mark the day, the Treasury boss will raise it and wave to the flashing cameras before walking into the August House to present President Uhuru Kenyatta’s last budget.

It’s being read earlier because we are in an election year.

The black briefcase was expected to lose its significance after the new constitution was passed in 2010 because most of the information in the budget should have been presented to parliament long before the statement is read.

President Uhuru Kenyatta holding the Budget briefcase when he was the Finance Minister.

This would have taken away the significance of the Budget Day reading because what Kenyans wait to hear is just the tax measures. Nevertheless, the tradition lives on.

Though it is now more ceremonial than it was previously, the Briefcase still remains a key accessory to the Treasury chief when he walked into Parliament Buildings.

Days before a budget is read, an employee of the National Treasury walks into the Cabinet secretary’s office to pick up the briefcase from where it is kept. His job is to service it and make it ready for the big day.

The employee makes sure the locks are working properly. It carries nothing else but the budget statement.

Former Treasury CS Henry Rotich.

This tradition has been passed on year after year because of the briefcase used to carry the 'big secret' in the budget and Treasury always wanted no one to take the thunder away from the cabinet secretary.

The briefcase has a special code and myth has it that it will electrocute you if you tried to open it without the password.

"I have also heard that it could electrocute you but no one has ever suffered that. I also do not know where it is kept, it is probably kept in the Cabinet Secretary's office," former Treasury Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge once told The Standard.

The code is only known to the cabinet secretary and a few other handlers.

Kenya inherited the briefcase tradition from the colonial government.

The briefcase was first waved to Kenyans at the then-new parliament that is now occupied by the Bank of India on Nairobi's Kenyatta Avenue.

At the time this road was known as Delamare Avenue.

The history of the briefcase stretches back to 1860, when then Britain's budget chief, William E. Gladstone, needed something to carry the massive load of documents he had to walk down to the House of Commons.

It was a lot of paper, as such speeches had been known to last hours. The original budget box was made: 14½ by 10 inches, wooden, lined in black satin and covered with red leather, and brass hinges.

But this is a little too big today because the budget speech now has fewer pages that would perfectly fit in an A4 envelope. But as tradition would have it, these too must be carried in the famous briefcase.

When Amos Kimunya was in office, the briefcase became a little too old and had to be replaced.

"I am not sure how much it cost. It has been replaced either once or twice. Most people with the institutional memory on the briefcase have left," a source at the National Treasury said.