Uhuru rejects Budget review

Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday declined to take on board changes made to the Sh1.15 trillion budget by Parliament’s Budget Committee.

Speaking at a meeting with the Budget Committee MPs at Nairobi’s Continental House, the Finance Minister said that any changes to his allocations were impractical because they’ll interfere with the execution of projects within specific ministries.

Mr Kenyatta said the move by MPs to re-allocate money to areas they felt needed more funds would simply put him on a collision course with the individual ministry.

“I cannot listen to you tell me that Defence requires another Sh2 billion, because if that money is going to come from another ministry, that ministry will then turn around to me, and tell me, ‘well, you’ve taken my money, go and fulfill your programme because I cannot achieve my objective’,” he said. “That’s why I am saying that the process of consultation must also involve the ministries where monies will be deducted.”

With that, the minister maintained that Treasury shall not execute the altered Budget, because the initial allocations had been carefully considered given that the budgeting process is a long one and takes up to eleven months to prepare.

The rejection of the MPs’ proposals by Treasury lays ground for fireworks in the House when the debate on the estimates set off, possibly next week or later this week.

MPs George Nyamweya (nominated, PNU) and John Mbadi (Gwassi, ODM) told the minister that the committee did not spent the better part of the recess holding public hearings just for the fun of it.

They said they were not seeking Treasury’s approval and told the minister that if he felt piqued because some of the promises he had made to ministries won’t materialise, then it is his problem, because such allocations in the estimates he tabled on June 8 in Parliament were subject to change by the House.

The minister’s intransigence follows attempts by MPs in the Budget Committee to alter the Budget by denying some ministries money because of what they regard as over-allocation, or simply unnecessary allocation in the Budget.

The MPs spent the better part of last weekend in Nyeri fine-tuning the changes to the Budget in exercise of their new-found powers in the Constitution to prepare the national Budget.

The MPs have been at loggerheads with the Treasury regarding the drawing up of the Budget, with many of them saying that whatever the Treasury had submitted to the House on June 8 when the Budget was read, were just mere proposals, which were subject to change before the money is approved in the House.

The report of the Budget Committee will be tabled in the House within the week and after approval, there will be an Appropriations Bill, which, once enacted, will allow the government to access the money approved by Parliament.

The chairman of Parliament’s Committee on Education, Mr David Koech (Mosop, ODM) together with his team had already tinkered with the Education Budget to get Sh6.6 billion to help in the employment of all the 28,000 trainee teachers in the country.

According to Mr Koech, the money was to be given to the Teachers Service Commission to execute the employment.

There's also Sh3 billion allocated to the spy agency, the National Security Intelligence Service, which has been chopped off.

The Budget Committee had also threatened to chop off Sh500 million from the Ministry of Planning, National Development and Vision 2030, after the ministers failed to appear to defend the ministry’s budget.

The money will be in the ministry’s recurrent budget, mainly that allocated to foreign travel.

The Ministry of Planning also manages the Constituency Development Fund, and by going for the recurrent vote, the MPs were perhaps keen to ensure that the Sh27.5 billion allocated for purposes of development will not be touched.

The CDF got Sh14.5 billion last year and has been allocated Sh23 billion in the current fiscal year.