Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 1151295,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1151295/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 210,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Farhiya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13179,
        "legal_name": "Farhiya Ali Haji",
        "slug": "farhiya-ali-haji"
    },
    "content": "through from the colonial time and even with successive Kenyan Government, no development has been done. Some counties, due to their climatic challenges, their potential to generate revenue is lower than those which are endowed by nature or as a result of Sessional Paper No.10 of 1965, all investments were done in those counties. According to the capacity to generate revenue done by CRA- and supported by the World Bank, Nairobi City County can comfortably generate a minimum of Kshs60 billion every year. Some of the reports put it at Kshs76 billion. If they have the potential, in the formula, they should have an inverse formula whereby if you are able to generate more, then you should be given less. That is the only way counties will generate more revenue and account for it. Counties such as Nairobi City County already have capacity to generate revenue. Why should the national Government continue funding them more? Those are some of the issues that need to be considered by this House so that the appropriation is done correctly. Sen. Kajwang’ has rightly pointed out that the Senate concentrates more on fiduciary risk reports rather than transactional type of reporting. What is the impact? Unless we use other Government agencies to collect data, does this House have the ability to monitor and evaluate the impact of the money that was allocated vis-à-vis the money each county has been spending? Such a move will show us whether the money allocated is commensurate with the money that was given. What was the poverty index of that county vis-à-vis many years ago? Nobody does this kind of analysis. One of the Bills that I sponsored was talking about the county statistics, which would have established such issues within the counties. As much as the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) might be doing something like that, they look at the countrywide data. If there were county officials who were taking care of that with some matrix reporting to the KNBS, then that would have been a favorable report or an indictment of a governor because it would have established the poverty index of a county when they took over versus the poverty index when their term ends. That data would have had a very big impact to ensure that counties deliver on their mandate. In terms of ensuring that counties develop well, there is accrual basis instead of cash basis used by the Government. If we used accrual basis, what would have happened is that in a financial year, if a contract is done up to certificates being issued, even when they are not paid, that should be an expenditure which should be captured in the system. That means that when the next exchequer releases are made in the following financial year, whatever had accrued should be paid. However, how it is accounted for does not help because it affects the following year's budget. So, counties might have under-delivered, although I know that counties never lose whatever is not released by the Exchequer. That would have been a neater way of ensuring that the expenditure is properly captured in the financial year they are incurred. It means that once money is released, anybody with pending bills should get paid directly from the accruals account instead of the expenditure account, which is subject to abuse like in the cases where I referred to where people request for money for one supplier but pay another."
}