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{
"id": 833293,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/833293/?format=api",
"text_counter": 282,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Kikuyu, JP",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Kimani Ichung’wah",
"speaker": {
"id": 1835,
"legal_name": "Anthony Kimani Ichung'Wah",
"slug": "anthony-kimani-ichungwah"
},
"content": "Therefore, I challenge the House or as Members of Parliament that even as we consider budget estimates it is not the Budget and Appropriations Committee that has the opportunity to scrutinise vote by vote of various ministries. Those of us who sit in departmental committees must take responsibility and role in the scrutiny of estimates more seriously than we do. Let us take to task the Cabinet Secretaries and Principal Secretaries who appear before us. Let them take us through line by line items of the votes in their ministries. It is that opportunity that we are given as Members of Parliament to scrutinise those budgets and re-allocate what we find is not necessary in a particular ministry, department or agency of Government to a more relevant and more productive area. Therefore, when we sit in television stations and complain that there is a lot of wastage in ministries or that ministries are spending much buying flowers and tea, ministers are spending a lot of money on chase cars… Yes, they have chase cars because we have appropriated money for them to have chase cars. If the austerity measures that were passed during the 10th Parliament when President Uhuru Kenyatta was Minister for Finance, to the effect that ministers should use vehicles whose capacity is not beyond 2,000cc and then we got the famous Passat, are not adhered to then somebody should answer. If that was the Government policy, then if a CS in a ministry you oversee in our departmental committees drives to Parliament in a 3,800cc vehicle with a Subaru 2,700cc as a chase car, they would be doing that because as Members of Parliament you have allowed them to do it. I challenge Members of Parliament, it is our responsibility, more so, during appropriations of funds to ministries, departments and agencies to ensure that we know where a CS gets money to employ a driver for a chase car, to fuel it and also buy a car that is beyond the rating that is allowed and fuel it. They are able to do that because we appropriated that money to that ministry. Therefore, in the next budget estimates, I hope and believe that this House will take the challenge more seriously. Not one single chair of a departmental committee has appeared before the Budget and Appropriations Committee to tell us that they have found unnecessary expenditure in a certain ministry, save for the Departmental Committee on Education and Research that was able to get savings from Recurrent Expenditure and appropriate the same towards development in our public universities in the last estimates. All the other departmental committees we all sit in as chairmen, we request for more money to be allocated not just to development, but also to Recurrent Expenditure. Therefore, I beg that as we move towards, hopefully, second supplementary estimates, and more importantly the 2019/2020 Budget Estimates, we take our work more seriously. I hope that as we move to the 2019/2020 Finance Bill, we will not suffer the fate of the last Finance Bill when we were considering the President’s Memorandum. It is also an opportunity for Members of Parliament to articulate issues based on facts and merit. I indicated when I was moving that had we not been able to pass the Presidential Memorandum, we would have left the country in a situation where we would have to borrow much more money than the Kshs562 billion. Therefore, with the estimated 57 and 43 per cent split between foreign and domestic borrowing, it means the Government would have been left with no choice but to come back and borrow from the domestic market more. What that would have done to the Central Bank rate, that Hon. Ndindi Nyoro spoke to when he was contributing, is that we would have gone from the 8 or 9 per cent that I think is now allowing people to borrow at 13 per cent to 10 or 11 per cent. That will drive the cost of borrowing and we know what that will do to the cost of goods and services. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}