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{
    "id": 768673,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/768673/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 158,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "in, year-out. Taxpayers’ money is being used to pay Senators to oversight the counties in terms of financial appropriateness and all other issues. I keep asking myself whether it is value for money to have Senators in this country. Otherwise, these things should not continue to occur. First of all, there should be adequate ways to deal with such issues. The whole idea of devolving money to counties was to address the issue of service delivery and equality in terms of revenue distribution. However, if that same revenue is not disclosed, it means that it has been misappropriated. I ask myself the question whether there is need to have counties. I am indicting everybody so that people feel the gravity of the issue that we are discussing. One of the ideas that comes to my mind that will help deal with such issues is that knowing well that different counties have different capacities to collect revenue, the budget allocation should factor in the fact that if a particular county has continuously collected higher revenue depending on its capacity, such a county should be rewarded, for example, by being given more budget allocation for doing what is right. The other issue that I want to discuss is the high wage bill. Are all the workers genuinely employed or some of them are ghost workers? If indeed some of them are ghost workers, the right machinery should be used to ensure that this issue is addressed conclusively so that counties do not continue to suffer from a huge wage bill. We appreciate that there is a lot of unemployment and probably due to that, governors are employing a lot of people to address this. I believe this is not the right way to address this. If there are right development projects that are addressing the right places, then, I believe that employment positions will just follow naturally. Therefore, my advice to the county governments is to ensure that they invest in development projects with capacity for future employment in mind. They should also look for better strategies to enhance revenue collection depending on each county’s capacity. There also should be strategies that will enhance counties that do not have capacity to generate more revenue. The other issue is with regard to the challenges related to the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS). As I was reading this report, I was surprised to find out that there are IFMIS connectivity challenges in Nairobi County. If there are connectivity challenges in Nairobi, what do we expect of other counties? Is this genuine or is this a user-bug problem? People do not know how to use IFMIS. I am seeing a lot of expenditure on training. Is this training focused on the wrong direction? If there was good training which is beneficial to the county staff, why is there a problem? Sen. Mwaura told us that they used to approve about Kshs1 billion every year to address some of the IFMIS challenges. Is this a bottomless pit that we are just putting money and there is no benefit for Kenyans? In that regard, what improvement or enhancement can they put in place to ensure that IFMIS works? If that is not possible, then how much more of Kenyan taxpayers’ money do we need to waste for them to realize that it does not work and that we need a better system than the IFMIS system? The other issue regarding IFMIS is that in terms of connectivity, most of the counties, especially, Nairobi County, are more connected. So, is this a connectivity issue or what is the real issue? This is an area, as the Senate, we should not ignore. Otherwise, we will be singing the same song, year in, year out with no solution in sight. The other question is, is there a policy to deal with the issue of over-expenditure where counties The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}