HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"id": 768621,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/768621/?format=api",
"text_counter": 106,
"type": "other",
"speaker_name": "",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": null,
"content": "confronted. I might be wrong, but the law was that after the auditing has been done, any extra employees whether inherited from the local authorities or those on secondment from the national Government were to be reverted to the national Government. However, this was never done and so, we continued with the problem of a bloated workforce and ghost employees, which ate into money that ought to have been spent on developing that county. Mr. Speaker, Sir, it becomes even more depressing to read that in some counties, that apart from basic salaries and other things, personal emoluments account for more than 51 per cent of the overall total expenditure. I would like to know what the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) has done to rationalize some of these personal emoluments. What made the cost to go up? Or is it a case where employees go on a trip, they do not account for that money? In other words, I would want to know the percentage of unaccounted for per diems for employees of county governments. If you go into that, you will discover that there is a lot of money which has gone into the pockets of employees and which cannot be recovered but which ought to be recovered. Mr. Speaker, Sir, on the issue of raising national development, one day I was driving from Busia to your county and I knew that I was in your county by the nature of roads. You made a lot of effort to ensure that the roads were good, but on the other end, the roads were not there. However, we have now resolved to work harmoniously together to ensure that the infrastructure of Busia County is improved so that the standards of our people improve. But one would have thought that Busia County, having two border towns of Malaba and Busia, the revenue collected would be quite enough to address some of its developmental needs. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the other issue is about the absorption rates of most of the counties, which is ranging between 60 per cent and 63 per cent. You then wonder why we have this very high absorption rate of counties vis-à-vis the developmental needs, which everybody knows are there. Why should we have this high lack of absorption rate? In other words, it means you cannot utilize the money, therefore, it would be carried forward to the following year, and so on and so forth. These are the issues that we ought to look into. But, overall, Mr. Speaker, Sir, my message and my hope is that in the next Auditor-General’s report, some of these things would not be there because we would have dealt with them. Definitely, in our second term, they ought not to be there so that the counties can now focus on the proper developmental needs. The counties which will achieve development in this country will be those that do not rely on the equitable share of revenue, but on the local revenue which they can raise through their development efforts. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}