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"content": "gone to so as to deal with these kinds of things, or the existence of the national Government coming in handy to help. The other thing, Madam Temporary Speaker, that we should, perhaps, look at is to accept, for the time being, to use the formula that has been set to allocate the funds to counties. But we should be very careful next year and the following years because counties are suddenly going to grow differently because of the revenues that are going to be generated by different counties, depending on the natural resource endowment in those counties. So, in three years time, we are going to have a new form of marginalization happening again in this country and, therefore, we need to relook at the criteria upon which funds are going to be allocated. This is because, certainly, with the shift and new ways of generating revenues by the counties, we are suddenly going to have a lot of differences in the economies of these counties and it will bring a new form of inequalities in our country. Therefore, we need to pay attention to the formula used in allocating revenues as well as the quarterly report which the Government is going to give us on counties. So, I really think we should look at that as Senators, because our role is oversight. Madam Temporary Speaker, as we debate this Bill, there is only a word, “oversight” for us, Senators, to look at. I want to thank my colleague, Sen. Sang – I know he is working on some legislation that is going to give us some teeth in the form of oversight so that we are able to actually participate and act as an early warning system for any misuse and wastage of some of those monies, because we can quickly evaluate the wastage and stop it without necessarily taking some of the counties down the drain. Madam Temporary Speaker, the allocation of funds which has been done has used a certain criteria, but one of the items that is missing in the criteria is the preparedness of counties to run governments; and I mean “real governments” that will deliver services. This unpreparedness was not catered for and I want to suggest that some of the grants that we would want to give to some counties would not necessarily have to be in terms of financial grants. We can give grants in terms of expertise. We can send experts to some of the counties instead of finances because, perhaps, what some of those counties would need – and I think it is a lot of counties – is some expert advice on a lot of areas, especially in terms of financial management. So, some of the things that we need to be doing at the moment is to accept the very difficult situation we find ourselves in as we try to establish the new devolved governments. We should also try and use the expertise which is there. We should not necessarily be very critical, but we need to be very careful about the wastage, fraud, pilferage and some of those other things that could come in. I think that is our role as an oversight body, so that we can learn through lessons on where we go wrong in some of these things. The last of the things that I want to mention, Madam Temporary Speaker, is on some of the institutions, for example, the existing parastatals in this country. There are some parastatals that stretch across the country while others are confined to certain counties only. We think that some of these parastatals are still very useful and they should probably be left, together with their finances, in the national Government so that they can operate. I am thinking of parastatals such as the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) and the Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KERRA), which are going to be useful. 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."
}