Kenya taps Sh207bn salary loans, CBK holds CBR, Microsoft patches

The Treasury borrowed Sh207.7 billion to pay salaries, debt repayments and other recurrent expenditure in the financial year ended June, according to the draft 2026 Budget Review and Outlook Paper. Total government borrowing for 2025/26 reached Sh983.7 billion. Funding day-to-day spending with loans breaches the Public Finance Management Act, which requires recurrent costs to be met from revenue. Every shilling borrowed for salaries adds to the interest bill that consumes the next budget and leaves less room for development. The BROP, to be tabled in Parliament, sets out how the Treasury plans to close the gap.

The Monetary Policy Committee held the Central Bank Rate at 8.75 percent on August 11, its third consecutive hold. Overall inflation was broadly stable at 6.5 percent in July, within the target band, while core inflation sat at 3.2 percent. The committee said the stance remains appropriate as it monitors the Middle East conflict, which has pushed up global energy prices, along with trade policy uncertainty and the Russia-Ukraine war. Kenya's growth accelerated to 5.3 percent in the first quarter, and the bank projects 4.9 percent for 2026. For borrowers, no relief yet: commercial lending rates remain around 14.4 percent.

The Employment and Labour Relations Court has held that employees who use employer-owned computers for personal business cannot automatically claim privacy when the machines are inspected for legitimate work purposes. The judgment draws a clear line for a workplace where personal and professional traffic mix on company hardware. For staff, the practical takeaway is to keep personal accounts and messages off work devices. For employers, the ruling backs monitoring policies, but only where inspection serves a legitimate purpose; random fishing expeditions could still be challenged. Companies should update their IT usage policies and make the rules explicit rather than assuming workers understand them.

Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday release fixes 398 vulnerabilities, including one zero-day already under active attack. CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS 7.0) is a race condition in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations; an attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. Check Point Research attributes the exploitation to the Lazarus group's Operation Dream Job campaign. Four other flaws score 9.8 and need nothing from the victim: they hit Windows DNS Server, Windows Deployment Services, Microsoft's QUIC implementation and HPC Pack. The kernel zero-day should be patched first, before the higher-severity but less exposed network flaws.

Brad Lightcap, one of OpenAI's longest-serving executives, is leaving to "start something new", he told staff on Tuesday in a message he shared publicly. He had already stepped back from day-to-day COO duties months earlier. His exit is the latest in a series of leadership changes at the lab as it scales up and faces stiffer competition from Anthropic, Google and a fast-growing open-source ecosystem. The departure matters beyond the headline: Lightcap was central to OpenAI's business deals and enterprise push, so customers can expect account relationships to be reshuffled. He has not said what the new venture will be.