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    "id": 380859,
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    "content": "issues that the Senate Majority Leader has already mentioned but I want to highlight three items which are important. First, I want to agree with him that the Committee of Finance, Commerce and Economic Affairs will be bringing amendments at the Committee Stage to raise the total allocation among the counties to Kshs210 billion, including the Kshs20 billion for conditional and Kshs190 billion which is sharable revenue. Those amendments and others will also be coming at the Committee Stage. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the issue of the functions of the county governments that have been mentioned is a very important thing because we are now aware that the counties did their budgets at the end of June. Those budgets are made up of two things: One, share of the national revenue that is allocated to them; two, is the local revenue that the counties generate from their own counties. As regards the share of the national revenue, the amount that each county shall include in its budget is based on this County Allocation of Revenue Bill. Because of the fact that the Bill is still being debated, it is our view that the budgets that have been done by the county governments to date are provisional. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the budget that has been approved for the county governments is not the first one. In the last four months, between March and June, there was the Transition County Appropriation Bill which provided for a specific amount of money to allow each of the counties to operate between March and June. That money was supposed to cater for operational expenses and salaries of the county governments for the period up to June. It has come to our attention that some counties have not paid their employees, particularly those that they took from the county councils and other local authorities for the past three months. It is important to point out that county governments have a responsibility to utilise the money that was allocated to them for the four months between March and June for payment of salaries for the staff they took. Coming back to this Bill, the most important clauses I want to highlight very quickly; one, is Clause 6(1) which says; “The functions gazetted by the Transition Authority for transfer to county governments in accordance with Section 23 of the Transition to Devolved Government Act shall form the basis for preparing the relevant county government’s estimates of revenue and expenditure for the financial year 2013/2014.” That is the point I want to make. I want to point out that the Transition Authority has not gazetted these functions as required by the Transition to Devolved Governments Act. This is the point that was being raised earlier. In spite of the fact that at the Summit, there was an expression for all functions to be devolved, it is our understanding that the Transition to Devolved Governments Act requires that each county should apply for functions to be transferred to them. The Transition Authority will carry out an assessment on their capacity. Based on that assessment, those functions are approved and resources are allocated. In fact, the Act, in Section 23, makes a provision that where a county government is not satisfied, The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}