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{
    "id": 768646,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/768646/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 131,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "What is shocking among the various counties is that the defunct municipal councils were collecting more revenue than the county governments yet most county governments have better infrastructure. They also have resources to help them establish more revenue collection in our counties. We hope that as devolution grows, it will benefit our people at the lowest level possible. One trend that we saw in the last five years is that there was dangerous political patronage and corruption. We should look out to protect our counties from political patronage. Before we went to the electioneering period, there were so many allegations that were being raised. Some of these allegations were that some counties were being politically patronized for the political gains. The governors were being arm-twisted to give money to some of the political honchos in this country. We need to look at this so as to protect some of these counties and ensure that money meant for development is used for the intended purpose. Finally, I want to raise the issue of employment. You find that most of the counties like Bomet and even Nandi were releasing task force reports on the issues of employment. We need to rationalize this because we have three types of employees at the county level. We have those belonging to the defunct municipal council, Transitional Authority (TA) and those who have been employed by the governors as a reward because they campaigned for them. We are, therefore, having a bloated wage bill, contrary to what is provided by the Public Finance Management Act. I want to agree with Sen. Cheruiyot when he says that we need to reduce the wage bill to below 15 per cent for us to ensure that more money goes to development. Sarah Serem’s term has come to a close today. No one would wish that the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) continue with its work because of the bad blood that they had with the Members of Parliament. However, we hope that they developed salaries and remuneration guidelines for county governments and the National Government so as to avoid this issue of payment that is being made for three people instead of one. Nowadays, you will find that in a situation where the county government is supposed to employ one person to perform the job of a sweeper, tea girl and a cleaner, they employ three people. One person will be a cleaner, the other person a tea girl and the other will be a sweeper. We should look at how to harmonise and rationalize this so as to save the cost of employment and remuneration of salaries for our people to get value. That will help us to channel more resources to development and avoid unnecessary spending. As the SRC Chairperson’s term comes to an end, there are so many proposals that they have put on the table. We hope that Sarah Serem’s exit report or handing over notes will assist the reconstituted team in the near future for us to protect our counties by ensuring that we do not use a lot of money in recurrent expenditure. Instead, we should channel more money into development. What the SRC has done might be laudable in terms of providing guidelines on employment at the county level because the National Government has always been sorted. I think that Sarah Serem has done extremely well. We should ensure that we utilise her handing over notes on policy guidelines of employment to protect our counties. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}