Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 768603,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/768603/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 88,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "are surpassing the 35 per cent mark. Counties like Mombasa, Nairobi and Kisumu are cities. When the county governments were put in place, there were already city council employees. Later, there were employees that were seconded by the national Government to the counties. There were also the statutory employees who were to be posted. You realize that there is a lot of replication of performance of activities based on the structures that were put. Something should be done to make sure that there is no replication of employees. There must be a way of phasing out the ones who are not required so that each county has enough employees to perform the duties that are expected. We are not supposed to surpass 35 per cent. I wonder how it is allowed. It is from year one, two and three. If there is a rule, and it is 35 per cent, why are some counties surpassing to 54 per cent? If there is a reason one must exceed the 35 per cent, it should be brought back to the Table and be considered. Nobody should be given a lump of money like Kshs6 billion for their county yet they do not follow the budgetary regulations that are put in place. It is wrong and we do not want to carry over bad behavior from the national Government to the county governments. That is the idea of devolution. It is meant to give people real time money. It has to be real time development for our counties. It is not supposed to transfer some of the ills that we have seen at whatever level to the county level. Secondly, is the issue of underperformance of allocation of revenue. In my view, the county governments should have three sources of funding. The first one should be from the national Government. Secondly, they should also have their local revenues. Thirdly, each county has natural resources. For example, Kisumu County has the lake. What else can we do in the lake to get funds? We can have tourism, transportation and fish farming. At the moment, we are getting our fish from China. This is very unfortunate. We have the largest fresh water lake but we still eat fish from China or the fish ponds. I am not saying that it is wrong to eat fish from China or from the ponds but why are we not utilizing our lake? We also have rice farming in Kisumu and the infrastructure is there. However, we do not want to develop it. Water, land and manpower are there but we still want to heavily rely on the national Government. The national Government should give money and we are pushing for higher allocation to the counties but how are we collecting our own resources? How are we getting our taxes from the markets and the activities in our counties? When we started, some counties were collecting more compared to now. We either overestimated the amount that each county can collect or the money is being collected and going into the wrong hands. Another practice that I know is going on in the counties is that they use money from the source. From my knowledge of finance, you cannot use money from the source. Money must get to the final destination before it is utilized. There are some bad practices that cannot go on at the county level. We must look at the national Government, equalization, the collection at the local level and the national resources. I have talked of fish, rice and sugarcane and other things such as tourism. We can develop it in our own ways in each county. If you go to Mombasa, there is a lot of The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}