Amending Finance Act will rescue taxpayers’ money from greedy officials
Prof Kithure Kindiki, the Senate Majority Leader. "There is no way Parliament will be subservient to the Judiciary,” Prof Kindiki said on Sunday in Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- In a disturbing trend, some counties are said to have spent millions on flowerbeds and providing tea for workers.
- The report exposed a litany of fraud and other forms of financial impropriety that have the DNA of Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing embedded in them.
If enacted into law, the Bill seeking to cap recurrent expenditure in the counties at 40 per cent of the budget will free scarce resources to build schools, hospitals, roads and other critical socio-economic infrastructure as opposed to lining the pockets of greedy county officials.
Time is now ripe to tame the wanton pillage of public resources witnessed since county governments became operational exactly a year ago.
The amendments to the Public Finance Management Act fronted by Senate Majority Leader Kithure Kindiki among others, will mark a critical milestone in safeguarding public resources from untrammelled abuse by avaricious county elites.
This is good news for taxpayers who have long endured the pain of seeing their money squandered.
It is common knowledge that in the short period they have been in office, most county officials have spent sizeable chunks of their budgets on useless expenditure such as expensive foreign junkets to “study best practices in development.”
A report released earlier this year by the Controller and Auditor-General captured the magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing county governments.
Weak accountability mechanisms and lack of oversight by the county assemblies have given the executives unfettered latitude with public funds. The result has been disastrous.
In a disturbing trend, some counties are said to have spent millions on flowerbeds and providing tea for workers. In a shocking instance, a governor is alleged to have signed petty cash vouchers worth millions of shillings.
In fact, the report exposed a litany of fraud and other forms of financial impropriety that have the DNA of Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing embedded in them.
This new form of corruption and impunity is by far, even more than the claimed interference by the National Government, the biggest threat to devolution.
It constitutes a travesty of our Constitution and a glaring failure by counties to uphold the basic tenets of accountability and prudent management of public resources.
Indeed, the behaviour of many of our county officials can be likened to a spoilt child squandering the school fees its parents toiled so hard to raise on fancy clothes and partying.
Kenyans are among the most heavily taxed people in the world (and among the poorest for that matter) and so, it defies logic why elected officials can engage in such wanton waste of resources.
By requiring that counties spend at least 60 per cent of their budget on development projects, the proposed law will not only curb such wastage, it will also ensure the constitutional raison d’être for devolution, namely promoting equitable national development, is realised.
FUNDAMENTAL MALAISE
It is a dream Kenyans fought for decades to achieve and we must not allow unchecked avarice to kill it.
Moreover, the proposed legislation to “ring-fence” development spending is timely as it constitutes a form of guarantee that we, the taxpayers, will get value for money.
This way, even the counties that have long lagged behind others in development will have their best shot at improving the basic infrastructure required to improve the welfare of their people.
Unfortunately, the Bill is being viewed in some quarters as an attempt to muzzle the counties. That ought not to be the case.
The National Government has been wrongly accused of scheming to scuttle devolution, but such allegations are a mere decoy to deflect public attention from the fundamental malaise afflicting our counties: the lack of accountability and blatant failure to address corruption and impunity.
I agree that the National Government may have at times appeared to be undermining governors for political reasons but still, I refuse to buy the argument that the Jubilee administration has the capacity to “kill” devolution given the robust constitutional safeguards entrenching devolved units.
In any case, the county leaders are elected by the people and only the people have the final say on the fate of the counties.
In a nutshell, county officials must stop fighting phantoms and embrace the reality of a new dispensation in which accountability is enshrined as a sacred tenet in our Constitution. The days of “eating” are gone.
Mr Choto is a media relations consultant based in Nairobi.
