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{
    "id": 607175,
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    "content": "items that are county government in nature but which are being budgeted for at the national level. It is time we did a follow up - I think this is a responsibility of my Committee. We transferred functions to the counties, how will the national Government work with counties to ensure that they have clear Ministries or functions that are county in nature? Have they tried to clean up their budgets to ensure that we have no double budgeting so that we do not have a situation where the national Government is budgeting for the same road that the county government is budgeting for? We have to look at that so that we do not have a situation where budgetary items are allocated to hospitals that are actually being run by counties. We must have an honest conversation, for example, about referral hospitals or what we call Level Five Hospitals. Is Nyeri County able to deal with Nyeri Provincial hospital? Is Mombasa County able to accommodate all patients from the Pwani region, who are going to be referred to that hospital? One incentive is to give that county, over and above, division of revenue that will ensure that we can finance those resources. How do we go in to even force these counties - that is the question that I was going to ask - to spend on health up to a certain level so that they do not put pressure on hospitals that are in the neighbouring counties? Therefore, it is important that we do a follow up on matters of transfer of functions so that allocation of resources is done properly. The national Government proposes that there be conditional grants in the health sector to deal with matters of free health services and free maternal health care. The Government proposes that there will be resources for ensuring we deal with diseases like cancer. That is a very noble idea. We went to Mexico as a Sessional Committee on Devolved Government, and we realized that in many countries where they have devolved systems of government, conditional grants are very useful tools that are used to ensure that resources are targeted on policies that national government had already put in place. So, it is important for us to also scrutinize, as a Committee - and I think the Chairperson of the Committee on Finance, Commerce and Budget is here - whatever shall be allocated as conditional grants. There must be a mechanism for the Senate to scrutinize so that those conditions are very clear and reasonable. We should also ensure that counties are living within those conditions and are not re-allocating that money. It also has to be clear whether the conditions include transferring the money to them or the vote of the money and budget is continuously going to be done at the national level. That criteria must be clear so that counties can be sure that if you have certain conditional grants from the national Government, you do not continue spending budgetary allocation of revenue on the same sectors that have conditional grants from the national level. Finally, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I want to talk about accountability. We have said over and again, that accountability is not negotiable. The only way we are going to achieve maximum benefit from devolution is what Sen. Moses Kajwang, who spoke eloquently, said; that we must deal with matters of rent seeking because devolution was not to create new lords at the local level. There is a serious competition as a result of the two levels of government and various levels of leadership as to who has made money using county resources, who is going to have financial muscles to control the next 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."
}