Kenyans must stop asking why Kenya has not defaulted and start asking who is being prepared to carry the default when the music finally stops.

Ghana was here.

Sri Lanka was here.

Zambia was here.

Argentina was here.

Lebanon was here.

The script is always the same, because a broke government borrows until lenders get tired, taxes until citizens are dry, leans on banks until credit disappears, pushes pain into pensions and domestic savings, then tells the public that sacrifice is needed to save the country.

That is why the SACCO story should scare Kenyans more than they currently seem scared, because SACCO savings are not government money, they are the private sweat of teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers, matatu people, boda riders, mama mbogas, small traders and workers who ran there after banks abandoned them.

In every default story, the government does not stand alone at the edge of the cliff, because it drags citizens there as guarantors through inflation, taxes, currency pain, bank losses, pension restructuring, frozen credit and forced patriotic nonsense dressed up as national recovery.

Banks already formed a comfortable debt circle with government, where lending to Treasury became safer and sweeter than lending to SMEs, which slowly choked biashara, starved the real economy and turned ordinary Kenyans into beggars inside their own banking system.

Now the same government that fed banks with public debt is walking into SACCOs, looking at the last pool of money ordinary Kenyans still controlled after taxes, deductions, mobile money charges, fuel prices, school fees and rent had already eaten their pockets.

The anus cannot be stitched to stop diarrhoea.

A debt crisis cannot be solved by raiding SACCOs, squeezing banks, eyeing M-Pesa, selling public assets and pretending that every desperate grab is an infrastructure plan.

Ghana called it domestic debt exchange.

Sri Lanka called it restructuring.

Argentina called it emergency controls.

Lebanon left people staring at bank balances they could not freely touch.

Kenya will give it a cleaner name, maybe national development, domestic resource mobilisation, infrastructure financing or patriotic investment, but the meaning will be the same.

The citizens are being prepared as guarantors for debts they never ate.

Kenyans are not angry enough, because if they understood where this road ends, they would know SACCOs are not the final target, they are the warning shot before banks, M-Pesa and every private pool of money still breathing outside Treasury’s hands.

The money is finished.