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{
    "id": 609994,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/609994/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 146,
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Madam Temporary, Speaker, by denying the Judiciary money for capital allocation, it means that rolling out and bringing services closer to the people and efficiency in clearing the backlog of cases will not be attained. We are having a National Assembly which is making sure Kenyans do not get what they voted for. So, they are not actually discharging their duties in line with what Chapter 6 says to which some Members already alluded; that they are abusing office and that needs to be checked. In terms of devolution, which is the main gain that Kenyans expected from this Constitution, we have a Kshs2 trillion Budget out of which we proposed that Kshs280 billion be allocated to counties. When we checked, we realized there was need to add something to take care of the health sector. It has been said before that money is still kept at the national Government while the sector is fully devolved but it has now become the business of the National Assembly to ask where the extra Kshs7 billion will be gotten from. My understanding is that it is the Treasury which is supposed to have that headache; where to get the extra Kshs7 billion because they are the ones who came up with the Budget Estimates, but now the National Assembly is giving itself the duty of looking for the money. That is being insincere. If the need was genuine, then it would have been the business of the Treasury to come up with that money but not the National Assembly trying to look for where to get the Kshs3 billion. Basically they are not working in the interests of this Constitution. Madam Temporary Speaker, Sir, with regard to IFMIS, what we have is a system where we have lost track of our expenditure because everybody is using paper. Budget estimates are changed left, right and centre, but if you capture it through IFMIS right from the beginning, then it will be easy to control how that budget is spent. It will also be easy for the Controller of Budget and the Treasury to quickly release money to the counties. We have been having a problem with absorption in the previous system because these systems were not being used and, therefore, efficiency was lacking. If the National Assembly feels that in the case of IFMIS there is no need of rolling it out, then we are saying that we should operate in the old system where we can easily hide our misdeeds where it cannot be easily reflected in the system. We also have the issue of the county assemblies which have not yet been connected. When we had a meeting with the County Assembly Speakers, that is one of the issues we discussed; that we want to have a separate accounting system from the county governments’. One of the issues was to be directly connected to the IFMIS. If IFMIS is curtailed through budgetary cuts, then we do not expect the system to work. We have leaders in the National Assembly who are trying to make sure that this Government does not move and the country’s Constitution is not implemented. They have even gone very far to make sure that they make as much money as possible from the Government system using these powers. The other day it was reported in the Press that some of them went to State House and told the President that with regard to the issue of Monica Juma, he had to open the State coffers to soften the ground. If you can go to the extent of telling the President to bribe you in order to approve your appointees, then what can you not do? As Kenyans, we have to think of the calibre of the people we are electing because this is our own making. 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."
}