Three Kenyan papers read the same line of the same table. One said matatu fares rose 16.8 per cent, one said 67, one said 0.3

The last row of Table 3 in the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics' July 2026 Consumer Price Index — the only public-transport row in the release — prices a single matatu ticket from Koja to Westlands at KSh 60.00 in July 2025, KSh 80.00 in June 2026 and KSh 100.00 in July 2026. Beside those prices, in the two columns the table's own header defines as July over June and July over July, it prints 0.3 and 16.8. Eighty shillings to a hundred is 25.0 per cent; sixty to a hundred is 66.7. The printed percentages sit 24.7 and 49.9 percentage points away from the printed prices.

Three Nairobi newsrooms have already quoted that row, and each took a different number out of it. The Kenya Times, on 31 July, took the words from the report's Key Drivers panel: country bus and matatu fares had declined by 0.3 per cent while city matatu fares rose by the same 0.3. The Star, a day later, took the column, reporting that city bus and matatu fares had increased 16.8 per cent over the year. Then on 4 August The Kenyan Wallstreet did the division, under the headline “How a Simple Trip to Work Became KSh40 More Expensive in One Year”, and arrived at a 67 per cent hike. Every other figure in that piece — 33.7 per cent on tomatoes, 28.4 on potatoes, 29.7 on diesel — is lifted straight from the bureau's printed percentage column. This is the one row where the reporter rebuilt the number from the prices instead, reaching an answer four times the size of the one printed two cells to its right, without remarking on the difference.

Where 0.3 comes from is not a mystery. Table 1 of the same report gives the whole Transport division a monthly change of 0.3 per cent, and the Key Drivers panel spends that figure four separate ways on facing pages. The likeliest reading is that July's percentage cells were filled from the item index rather than from the three prices beside them — a reading of the documents, not a statement about what happened inside the bureau. The 16.8 traces to nothing else in the release; as a standalone number it appears exactly once in fourteen pages. Re-derived from their own prices, all 245 priced rows in the twelve consecutive editions from August 2025 through July 2026 come out clean but this one, the next-worst gap being five hundredths of a percentage point. Transport is the fastest-rising of Kenya's thirteen CPI divisions at 15.6 per cent over the year, which is what makes a jump from 80 to 100 shillings unremarkable and the 0.3 beside it not. As of Tuesday the bureau's index still serves a single July file, byte-identical to the one released on 31 July, with no erratum against Table 3.