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{
    "id": 622871,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/622871/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 292,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Ganya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 18,
        "legal_name": "Francis Chachu Ganya",
        "slug": "francis-ganya"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Deputy Speaker for giving me this opportunity to support the Controller of Budget Bill. This is a very important constitutional Bill because it will enable us to realize Article 228 of our Constitution. In the past, the Office of the Controller of Budget and the Office of the Auditor-General were merged into one. The current Constitution enabled us to have these two offices. One is responsible for Budget and the other one is responsible for Audit. With this new Bill, we will have a fully-fledged Office of the Controller of Budget with the mandate to ensure effective and prudent management of public funds. Being a new office in the country, it is still under establishment to deliver on its mandate of ensuring prudent management of public resources at both the national and the county government levels. It must be resourced financially as well as in terms of human capital. For it to be enabled to deliver on its constitutional functions, it is important that this Parliament, as it has been clearly stated by my friend Hon. Bady of Jomvu, funds it when this House appropriates budgets to other constitutional offices. The House should ensure that this office is fully considered. This is because if we have to deal with issues of corruption – if we have to tighten the fiscal management of our resources in this country – such offices need to be fully resourced both in terms of human capital and in terms of enabling it to have offices and structures both at the national and county levels of government. Until we realize this, there is no way we will deal with issues of corruption at the county level, where people feel that instead of devolving power and resources, we have equally devolved corruption within our devolved units. We can only deal with this issue if such constitutional offices are enabled to function at their best rather than having skeleton offices with no human and technical expertise that is required to deliver on the constitutional mandate. It will be in vain if we do not enable this office to build capacity at the county government and to enable them do prudent fiscal management of resources at the devolved level. This will help reduce wastage of public resources. That is the only way we can minimize on wastage of public resources at all levels of government, but largely where we have new units. Hon. Deputy Speaker, while it is important for the audit to show corruption and wastage, it always comes at the end when crime has been committed and resources have been wasted. The Controller of Budget is able to manage and implement the budget. They can also tighten the fiscal management of these resources. It is this office that allows withdrawals of funds by the county government and the national government. If it is tightened at that level, the corruption The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}