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{
    "id": 1077428,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1077428/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 140,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Bondo, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Gideon Ochanda",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1264,
        "legal_name": "Gideon Ochanda Ogolla",
        "slug": "gideon-ochanda-ogolla"
    },
    "content": "Our needs will never be the same again. Counties have different needs and priorities. Lamu is different from Busia. Baringo is different from Narok. That is exactly why those counties are supposed to have different governments for purposes of how they want to look at their priorities. At this point, I still do not see the parameters that have been developed and approved by the Senate as being useful to this country. It is something that must still be revisited. Getting down to the usage of money at the county levels, there is a much bigger problem. Something needs to be looked into. I do not know whether the time for the national Government, which definitely has a constitutional mandate to help counties, has expired. The national Government was supposed to support the building of capacities of county governments to see what exactly they are supposed to do or what they must do. The budget process in counties needs to be a replica of the budget process that we do in the National Assembly under the national Government. It is not very easy because our budget process is guided and timed. We are usually sure that the Budget Policy Statement (BPS) will be there by March. We will be given indicators in terms of the directions that we are supposed to go. We know that, that is the priority of the nation and those are the main agendas. That kind of arrangement is not there in the counties. Counties do not have Budget Policy Statement. They fully rely on what they call the County Integrated Development Plans (CIDPs) which are sometimes very irrelevant because they are copied from one county to the other. They are also very irrelevant because of the time that they are brought out. In many cases, they are not respected. Beyond that, counties are using almost 30 per cent of their time on what they call public participation and how they will allocate their monies. The Senate allocates money like we are doing at the moment. Once money gets to a county, that county starts getting into its own processes. That process is not properly guided in many counties. In my philosophy and the way I know governments are supposed to be, it is normally said that the Government is “man writ large”. The Government is a person that is made big. It is supposed to think big for the people. If you have a budget and resources and you want an individual who has completely no idea of how a government runs to guide where to allocate resources, there is a problem. That is a major problem in the counties, particularly in their budget process. Something really needs to be looked into. The capacity of the county governments in terms of the steps that we go through and how we come up with our budget as a national Government and in this House needs to be improved for purposes of making sure that, at least, their budgets work. As at now, things are haywire. In fact, a lot of the monies that we are talking about and allocating… I believe that the pending bills are so massive because many of them are not structured in a sense of priorities. Many are just allocated. For instance, the county just decides that we are going to do road A. It is so ad hoc . It is brought up either in the executive meeting or wherever. The contractor starts to construct the road the following day. Things are done in a very ad hoc manner. By the end of the day, the build-up on pending bills becomes a norm. We expect it in every county because this is exactly what is happening. However, it is not right."
}