Governors in new push for roads management

County governments now want to manage all roads within their counties, save for highways.

Based on an argument on a ruling that was made on the Kenya Roads Bill, the Council of Governors on Tuesday said the court had decided on two categories of roads in the country. That is, national government trunk roads and county roads.

They want all roads classified as class A and B to be managed by the national government. Class C roads, that traverse counties, they said, should also be under the national government. However, if Class C roads are only within the county, the governors want to manage them. They also said all the other categories of roads should be under counties.

Further, they want the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (Kura) and Kenya Rural Roads Authority (Kerra) scraped as they were “eating into their jurisdiction”. The council said the new bodies formulated early in the year to manage roads should only take care of those under the national government.

The governors said this at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi when they met the Senate committee on Roads and Transport and other stakeholders.

In their submission through Mr Peter Wanyama, an adviser to the council, they declared part of the Bill unconstitutional and want a revision.

“The national government is vested with the construction and operation of national trunk roads, and setting standards for construction and maintenance of other roads within the counties. It has no role in the construction and the maintenance of county roads or in the control of outdoor advertising.

Its agencies such as Kenha (Kenya National Highways Authority), Kura and Kerra have no role in respect to county roads upon full transfer of the roads function to counties,” Mr Wanyama said as he quoted part of the ruling.

“But the Bill can only be cured if we agree on the proper classification of roads,” he added.

OPEN UP ROADS

The governors present, among them James Ongwae (Kisii), Salim Mvurya (Kwale), Joseph Ndathi (Kirinyaga), Okoth Obado (Migori), and the council’s vice chair John Mruttu (Taita-Taveta) were quite incensed by the national government’s claims that they lack capacity to handle these roads.

“This is a red herring issue as there is no reason why we cannot carry that mandate,” said Mr Mruttu. “When we took over the counties, there was no evidence that the national government could open up roads the way we have.”

Another issue that arose was the sharing of the fuel levy that goes towards maintaining roads. The governors who have been receiving 15 per cent of the total figure want it raised to 46 per cent.

A representative from the Transport ministry said it was in talks to see how the figure could be increased as it had also realised that counties managed more roads.

Senator Moses Kajwang’, who was the acting chair on Tuesday, said they had given the ministry time, before November 15, to present its report so that it could be presented to the Senate.

“We have a better aggregation of engineers that is amazing. The other authorities barely have 20 engineers in their departments, and in any case if we cannot handle big projects, we can outsource them,’ Kisii governor James Ongwae added.

Another issue that arose was the sharing of the fuel levy that goes toward maintaining roads. The governors who have been receiving 15 per cent of the total figure want it raised to 46 percent. But the Commission of Revenue Authority recommended the figure to be increased to 25 percent.

The governors said they have expanded more roads which require more funding to maintain and they should also control outdoor advertising even on roads done by Kenha.