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{
    "id": 105440,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/105440/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 325,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Prof. Kamar",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 33,
        "legal_name": "Margaret Jepkoech Kamar",
        "slug": "margaret-kamar"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir. I rise to support this Motion that the House adopts the Report of the Budget Committee on the on the Budget Policy Statement. This is history in itself since we are adopting the first Report of the First Policy Statement since the Fiscal Management Bill was adopted in this House. It is a real shame that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministry of Finance is not represented here. The only thing we can say is that we look forward to the day when Ministers will come from outside so that they can be disciplined, come to the House and respect it. I guess the problem now is the mix between the Executive and Parliament. This will be a thing of the past very soon and we are consoled by that. The Ministry officials should have been here to listen to what the Chairman of my Committee has said. He has raised issues that are very important. A Budget is as good as the planners. If we do not plan and budget haphazardly, we will never be able to measure anything out of what we have done. I will only emphasize a few issues. One of them is the issue of Budget and prioritization which, as a Committee, we did not see any evidence of. It is a pity that we have something called “Vision 2030” and nobody seems to want to obey it. We have spent a lot of money to come up with that Vision 2030. Arising from that, the Ministry of Planning, National Development and Vision 2030 demanded that every Ministry comes up with a strategic plan. A lot of money was used in workshops to decide how they will prioritise. They set that out in their strategic plans. Further, there was something called “performance contracting”. Two weeks ago, we demanded from the Prime Minister an explanation on how the performance contracting is being implemented. Again, we spend a lot of money. Many of us, when we were in the Civil Service, signed the performance contracts. It would have been obvious that if you want to come up with a Budget, then it must respond to the Strategic Plan in order for you to fulfill the Vision 2030 on one hand and, on the other hand, to assess the performance of civil servants through the performance contracts. However, there is no relationship. We analyzed that and looked at various issues, but we could not see the relationship between the performance contracts and the Budget. So, how will we rank the performance of the Civil Service if the budgets do not respond to what has been targeted and chosen through the strategic plans? It is a terrible error. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, another error I would like to comment on is the issue of the criteria used in the allocation of resources. It is a requirement and not a request in the Fiscal Management Act which was passed by this House and which all of us must respect, that the Budget Policy Statement will provide the criteria used to apportion available resources to programmes and budgets. That is missing. If that is the case, then who knows who decided how to allocate money? After passing the Fiscal Management Act, it was very clear that we did not want “business as usual”. We wanted Kenyans to know where their resources have gone to. We also wanted a decision on the allocation of resources not to be done by one Ministry, but to be done by all of us including this Parliament. In the absence of that, I think we need to take the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministry of Finance to task. It should go back and give us the criteria it is using. I urge the different Departmental Committees that deal with Ministries to be very vigilant and keen when looking at this. We have already spoken to eight out of the 12 Committees and we are yet to listen to four Committees. All of them said that there is no link between the Budget and the strategic plans and the civil servants are also complaining. So, who will bring the answers? If we are unable to stick to the law that we have created here, how will we save ourselves from the disaster of resource allocation being done haphazardly? It will be careless for this Parliament not to reprimand the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministry of Finance for what it is doing. It will be careless for us not to demand that we actually get to know how the resources of this country will be shared out the way it has been outlined in the Fiscal Management Act. So, it is my appeal to this House that since we have the Act, we must obey it and make the implementers obey the same. It is very important because that is the very basic thing that we require. It is what people call the “irreducible minimum” when you talk of a policy statement. If you do not have that and you mix up issues like we observed--- The strategic issues and the frame work for implementation were completely mixed up. In some cases, it was not clear what the outcomes were. In some cases, we realized that the areas of priorities were mixed up. It is very difficult to know whether the mixing up is intentional or it is because this is the first Policy Statement and they have also not known how to do it. We need to be very clear that whatever the Act makes demand of, we receive the required issues."
}