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{
    "id": 1134186,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1134186/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 166,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13165,
        "legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
        "slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
    },
    "content": "this is the only one that is worth breaking a Christmas holiday for. It is an important national duty and it gives direction. The importance of the BPS, as was mentioned by colleagues who spoke ahead of me, is that it lays the strategic vision for the country in terms of budgeting and lays the walls upon which all the rest of the expenditures and income are supposed to fall within. If you do not pass a proper BPS, then you cannot have a budget. It is upon the implementation of what has been set out in the reports of both Houses of Parliament that the National Treasury prepares a budget and submits it to the National Assembly for approval. It is worth noting that over the years, the report of the Senate Committee on Finance and Budget has continuously been ignored by the National Treasury. This has been happening since the inception of this House in 2013. We give salient recommendations and they are ignored yet we are leaders just like our colleagues in the National Assembly. Most of us have a global view. When you interact with the Members of the National Assembly, you will realise that their views are tilted towards appreciation of the work done by the national Government with little appreciation of the role that devolution plays in our country. There is always a clash of vision, purpose and planning in terms of the direction that the country needs to take. This report has made serious recommendations. Over the years, we have become intelligent on how we handle our work just as the bird that Chinua Achebe talked about which said; ‘since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.' That is what our Chairperson, Sen. Kibiru, is leading us to do. The National Treasury continues to ignore the recommendations of the Senate thus we may as well not agree with them from the onset. We are actually varying their recommendations on the amount of money that they want to give to the counties. They want to give the counties Kshs370 billion and that is a stagnation of what was done the previous year. We were all in this House and remember the battle and the tears that were shed for us to get the county allocation to Kshs370 billion. Their proposal is an insult to the intelligence of this House, the purpose of our deliberations and the more than 10 weeks that we spent haggling to push that figure to Kshs370 billion. We should make a commitment not to turn back once we pass this report even if it means that we stick our necks out until the next administration in August. In any case, we passed the 2018/2019 Financial Year County Allocation of Revenue Bill in August or was it September. Therefore, there will be no emergency. We must stick to our guns and maintain the position on this BPS. The fair figure that should be given to our counties is in excess of Kshs500 billion. If this budget is growing by 9.2 per cent then the budget of the counties should also grow by an equal figure. This is not a figure that the Committee on Finance and Budget plucked out of the blues, it was empirically achieved. We did an extrapolation and took inflation, growth of revenue and the growth of the overall size of the budget into consideration. Our duty under Article 96 of the Constitution of Kenya is to protect the interests of counties and their governments. How can we protect the interests of the counties if we are not sticking firm and picking out obvious errors such as what is being proposed in this BPS?"
}