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{
    "id": 622895,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/622895/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 316,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Mwaura",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13129,
        "legal_name": "Isaac Maigua Mwaura",
        "slug": "isaac-mwaura"
    },
    "content": "Yes, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. First of all, I want to complement you on being the Chairperson of SONU. That is quite an accolade. I only knew that you used to be the Speaker of the Congress. Your acumen has been exemplified in this House. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I rise to contribute to this debate. From the word go, the Office of the Controller of Budget is very critical. One would imagine that the title is misleading. When this Office was formed by the Constitution, many Kenyans thought that this would be the person who would look at the estimates and effectively, as the word may be, control budget. We have seen an office without a statute, which has been relegated to deal with issues of quarterly reviews of budgets and also giving approvals of expenditure. In my opinion, that is more or less like the work of a mortician looking at what has already been done and making analysis. We have seen an office that has been faced with a lot of challenges. People have been militant towards that office. I also note, for example, that when it came to classification of independent offices, the Office of the Controller of Budget was actually put below the Office of the Auditor-General. That was a misnomer because clearly, these offices should be at par. There have been talks about the ethnicity of the occupant of that office. That is something that we need to look at because it is important to respect the office holder rather than just look at the semantics or the imagination around ethnicity. Clause 5 of the proposed Bill needs to be strengthened so that the Controller of Budget receives estimates that are itemised. We have shifted to programme-based budgeting. But even under those programmes, there is need to have delineation of the expenditures that would go to a ministry, department or an agency. More often than not, there are many details that are left to the imagination and so a lot of expenditure that is unnecessary is hidden in very huge budgets. We need to ensure that we empower the Office of the Controller of Budget to look at that so that Kenyans get value for money. The other thing that we need to tighten up is the kind of lacuna we find in terms of monies that are borrowed from outside the country. It should be very clear because we have seen an aspect of misinterpretation in the Public Finance Act and the regulations thereof. The regulations have provisions that seem to countermand the whole architecture of financial control in this country. We need to empower the Controller of Budget to have a say so that there is no ambiguity between that office, the Office of the Auditor-General, National Treasury, Kenya Revenue Authority and Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). We need to ensure that there is totality of that, especially when it comes to issues of borrowing. The other issue that this Bill needs to address clearly is the public debt. I am a very worried Kenyan because when I look at the Government expenditure I find it is clearly unsustainable. We are talking about collection that is rather unverified of about Kshs1.3 trillion, but the targets are always below Kshs1 trillion. Our expenditure is close to Kshs2 trillion. In the 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."
}