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{
    "id": 469057,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/469057/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 88,
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "is not an affront to Laikipia, but a historical anomaly and which everybody knows, I am sure. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I also know that we are going to have the Bill on Revenue Allocation, but as we deal with division, I think our Committee should help the clownery of Senate in analyzing those functions that are with the national Government and have been transferred to the county government and are continuing retaining and attracting resources at the national Government and which must be rationalized. For example, agriculture, water services and so on are moving to the counties yet a casual look at the Budget indicates that the Ministry of Devolution is choking a whooping Kshs68billion. Even assuming that the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF) is part of that money and even assuming that each constituency is getting Kshs100 million on CDF, that is only Kshs20 billion. The rest of the money must be devolved to the counties. We do not want devolution where the centre continuous micro-managing the counties in service provision and delivery. The counties only stand to deliver services and show the public that devolution is, indeed, attractive and beneficial if they get enough resources. So, I want to urge Cheserem and his team and also the Senate to continue taking into account the interests of the counties by asking for more and more resources. In this country, apart from security, education chokes a very heavy share of our revenue. Contrary to our expectations, you can see pre-primary education is still with the counties. There is a definition of roads as county roads. Nobody has ever sat down to say which is a national road and a county road. We have roads criss-crossing everywhere from one county to another. If we are talking about county roads, are we enabling counties with enough revenues to undertaken tarmac roads in their counties? The funds we are giving are not enough. So, we will rely very heavily on the work of the Committee when we go to the Committee stage to assist the Plenary to make sure that our counties are well catered for. Mr. Speaker, Sir, lastly, even as we have a formulae that was approved by Parliament, a casual look again indicates that the formula is not being followed to the letter, but that is for the next Bill. I encourage hon. Senators to look particularly at their counties considering their special and unique features on population, size, levels of development and so on. You will find that some counties do not even need half of the revenues, but they are given more. Those ones which require much more are given very little. What we should not rubber stamp--- I am not talking about Mt. Kenya, Mr. Kembi- Gitura. I am talking about counties."
}