Governing Public Money: Law, Policies and Political Economy

That pothole destroying your car? A fiscal decision. The clinic without medicine? A budget line. The debt your grandchildren will repay? Contracted in your name, without your consent.Public money is not government money. It is yours.This book shows you where it goes.Drawing on a decade of experience across thirty-two countries and the training of over five thousand practitioners, Lyla Latif dismantles the technical fog surrounding public finance and reveals the power relations underneath. How colonial fiscal systems were designed to extract, not serve, and still do. How international tax rules drain African resources through architectures built without African voices. How debt becomes a weapon. How budgets betray. How corruption thrives in complexity.But also: how it can be different.From constitutional foundations to tax law, from sovereign borrowing to budget execution, from devolution to digital transformation, this book covers the full terrain of public finance management law. Its final chapter recovers what colonialism erased, this being the Islamic fiscal institutions that governed economies for centuries before being declared invisible.Kenya is the lens. Africa is the context. The implications are global.Rigorous. Accessible. Unflinching.Because understanding public money is not optional. It is how citizens stop being subjects. Read more