Transition Authority asks Senate to extend mandate for three years

The Transition Authority (TA) has requested Senate to consider extending its transition period by at least three years to enable it complete pending activities.

And as its mandate states, the authority is required to oversee the implementation of devolution over a period of three years from the date of the general elections.

As such, TA’s period is supposed to end at the end of 2016.

However, in a special report to the Senate on the status of the implementation of its mandate prepared in October, the authority says it has encountered numerous challenges that have forced it to leave some essential activities pending.

The authority, which is chaired by Kinuthia Wamwangi raised the issues with the Senate on October 17, in Mombasa where they had a session before preparing the report.

Some of the emerging transitional challenges TA has faced while unbundling and transferring functions to county governments include inadequate funding.

ALLOCATED ONLY 5PC

TA says in the report that they were allocated a paltry five per cent of what they had requested this year.

“This is hardly enough to cover recurrent costs given that TA pays top-up allowances for interim county staff,” says the report, which has just been released to the media.

There are others challenges like realignment of laws touching on devolved functions, which have made it difficult to transfer some of the assets and liabilities to the regional governments.

An example, as the report states, is the transfer of betting, casinos and other forms of gambling.

The function has remained under the national government on the grounds that the gambling sector can be used for money laundering, which is criminal.

“Extension of the transition period will guarantee the sustenance of the devolution mechanism,” TA tells Senate in their report adding that there is also the need to manage the transition from the current county administrations to the next after the 2017 General Elections.