President's Sweeping Declaration

KITUI – President William Ruto announced on Thursday, November 13, 2025, that his administration has successfully removed every Kenyan from the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) blacklist. Speaking during a media engagement at the Kitui State Lodge, the President stated that all previously negatively listed borrowers are now cleared and have been integrated into the government's Hustler Fund credit scheme. "There is nobody in CRB. We have removed them," President Ruto declared, framing the move as the fulfillment of a key campaign promise to broaden financial inclusion for millions of Kenyans previously locked out of the formal credit market.

Contradictions with Official Policy and Data

The President's statement, however, is in direct conflict with established credit reporting regulations in Kenya and previous clarifications by his own administration. According to the Banking (Credit Reference Bureau) Regulations, 2020, negative information, such as a loan default, is retained on a borrower's credit file for five years after the final settlement of the debt. In cases of bankruptcy, the data is held for seven years. This retention period is a standard practice in global credit information sharing (CIS) mechanisms.

In July 2025, Susan Mang'eni, the Principal Secretary of the State Department for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development, reinforced this policy. At a leadership forum, she explained that a CRB listing is not inherently negative and includes both positive and negative credit histories. Mang'eni clarified that even after a debt is fully repaid, the record of that default remains for the legally stipulated period. "Once you get negatively listed on CRB, you stay in that status for about seven years, in default status, even after you have paid," she stated on Thursday, July 17, 2025.

Furthermore, the President's previous announcements have focused on delisting specific numbers of defaulters, not the entire list. In July 2023 and again in August 2025, President Ruto spoke of removing seven million Kenyans from the CRB blacklist. Data released in a joint report by the Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya, Creditinfo, and the Credit Information Sharing Association of Kenya (CIS Kenya) in August 2024 showed that regulatory changes had led to a significant drop in negative listings, from over 2.2 million in 2019 to 933,551 by the end of 2023.

The Role of the Hustler Fund

The government has consistently positioned the Hustler Fund as an alternative credit lifeline for Kenyans with a poor credit history. The President reiterated this on Thursday, stating that borrowers had been "transferred to the Hustler Fund." Government policy has been to use the fund to build a new credit history for borrowers, rather than relying solely on traditional CRB scores. However, officials have previously been careful to distinguish this from a complete erasure of past credit records. In September 2024, Cooperatives Cabinet Secretary Wycliffe Oparanya indicated that the government was exploring options other than CRB listing for Hustler Fund defaulters, aiming to recover funds without harming their business lives.

Silence from Regulators and Industry Players

As of Friday, November 14, 2025, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), which regulates the country's three licensed CRBs—Metropol, TransUnion, and Creditinfo—has not issued a public statement to confirm or deny the President's claim. The CRBs themselves and the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) have also remained silent on the matter. This lack of immediate confirmation from the key institutions that manage and utilize credit data has created uncertainty within the financial sector. Lenders rely on the accuracy and integrity of CRB data to assess risk and make informed lending decisions. A complete and sudden removal of all negative credit information would represent a fundamental shift in the country's credit information sharing system, the implications of which are yet to be clarified by the regulator.

The assertion raises critical questions for Kenya's financial and banking sector. A key concern is how financial institutions will now assess credit risk for millions of borrowers if all historical negative data has been expunged. Without official communication from the CBK, the operational status of the CRB reporting mechanism remains unclear. FURTHER INVESTIGATION REQUIRED.