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{
    "id": 1078331,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1078331/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 455,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Emuhaya, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Omboko Milemba",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13328,
        "legal_name": "Jeremiah Omboko Milemba",
        "slug": "jeremiah-omboko-milemba"
    },
    "content": "we are using. To some extent, that particular formula still favours the larger counties at the expense of the counties that are highly populated, but are small in area size. I come from a county that is small, but the population is very high. So, possibly, in future, we shall have to relook at that formula with the aim of ensuring that the people get the funds and not the area size or just the poverty index. Also, we need a proper evaluation of the poverty index throughout the country to ensure that the records that we use are correct, even if they are from the Kenya Bureau of Statistics (KEBS). This will benefit all the people, especially the masses where we are. So, we should go for the person instead of the geography and the size of the county. Secondly, yes, the money goes to the counties, but how will they use it? The counties still have to work very hard on issues of pilferage of the funds that they are given in terms of monitoring and overseeing the programmes they implement. We still have many county government projects that have been allocated a lot of money, but they are incomplete - meaning that there is a lot of wastage. Thirdly, I would like to speak on what my colleague who has just spoken here talked about. If you hear the governors speak, you will realise that they would even want to become Cabinet Secretaries. It is very sad. They feel that the Cabinet Secretaries control more funds that they receive more regularly than themselves. They harbour a spirit of almost giving up on management of the county governments. They look at themselves as people who must continuously fight for them to get funds. In fact, if you listen to the governors speak through the Chair of the Council of Governors (CoG) – it was previously Hon. Oparanya – he always turned into a trade unionist. I notice that they are now competing with some of us in the trade union in agitation. That picture is not good for this country because the counties are a level of government that needs more and regular funding. So, I wish to call upon the national Government and, more so, the Executive and its relevant agencies – the National Treasury and the Exchequer – to fund the county governments in a timely manner. The history of county governments in this country is old. I am blessed to be a history teacher. They are the kind of units that we had before and were abolished because people preferred centralisation of resources. The centralisation of resources ended up not being very good for the country, because we were unable to re-distribute resources across the country. Only few areas were benefitting at the expense of others. So, sometimes, when I see the misuse of money, yes, I call upon the proper use of money within the counties. But I prefer when they use the money well and is distributed in every far-flung corner of Kenya than when that money is centralised. I want to believe that the Treasury does not have any interest in killing county governments just like they were killed immediately after Independence. That is a direction we should never take again. Let us deal with them where they use the money properly, but let us never dream about going back to the old system where we centralised the usage of money in the country. That was not good for us. Finally, on the issue of how the county governments deal with some of their sectors, I will speak only about one - the vocational training centres. Formerly, the money was Ksh2 billion to every county. And the money was ring-fenced so that it directly went to vocational training. When I talk about vocational training, I mean those polytechnics that are otherwise not covered under TVET and are not also covered by the Ministry. They are under the county governments. Because they wrestled over how much would go to the county governments and how much would remain at the national government, they decided to give part of the Ksh2 billion as part of the general revenue to county governments. So, the risk we face is that those village polytechnics are going to die. I see most governors putting that money into other uses other than the real use at vocational The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}