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{
    "id": 842989,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/842989/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 231,
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    "content": "can be distributed and on which people can be trained and access rights provided. Why can the Treasury not allow counties to upload budgets on their own? Madam Temporary Speaker, this is fundamental because in my county, for almost three weeks the story was that Homa Bay County budget was approved late and so it has not been uploaded into the Treasury platform. It took two to three weeks of parents sending children to school without school fees and workers going without pay simply because of such operational and transactional processes. Madam Temporary Speaker, that is not the end of the problem. When the budget has already been uploaded with all the pain and ‘lobbying’ and despite this Cash Disbursement Schedule, for a county to get money, there has to be the approval from the Controller of Budget. That is a constitutional process. It is a process that is in the law. How does it work? If a county wants money they have to send someone to the office of the Controller of Budget. Someone has to board a plane or a vehicle to Nairobi with a paper to the office of the Controller of Budget. After that, the person has to walk over to Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) which does not work beyond 2.00 p.m. Again, we have an operational and transactional issue, but this can have the impact of delaying disbursements to a county by one week or two weeks, during which a lot of things could have gone wrong. We keep asking the Controller of Budget why they cannot automate the approval process, so that counties do not have to travel to Nairobi. The story that is not told loudly is that for your approvals to be fast-tracked, you have to lobby. Again, what does ‘lobby’ mean? Maybe it means smiling and just strutting in the corridors, but in the real sense, lobbying could have greater connotations than just smiling and looking nice. We have to audit, review them and fix these processes. As if that is not enough, when a county uploads its budget and obtains approval from the Controller of Budget, there is another animal called the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS), which if it is down, the way it goes down for two months at the end of every financial year, counties cannot access cash. They have a budget, approvals and Treasury says that they have sent money, but it cannot be accessed. As we look at this Cash Disbursement Schedule, it is important that we do a process mapping, which can be done by the Committee on Finance and Budget in conjunction with the Committee on County Public Accounts and Investments and the Committee on Information, Communication and Technology. Some of these issues are bottlenecks that arise because of the systems that we have put in place. I also want to encourage the establishment of Parliament, particularly the Office of the Clerk, that there are certain competencies that must be developed internally. These are the competencies that will do the process mapping, the technical considerations, reviews and benchmarking, and then advise the Committees appropriately. I have no doubt about the competence of the staff and the clerks that are in this Senate and Parliament, but they need to be better organised so that some of the things that we talk about in our meetings and Plenary are converted to action. We are politicians who are good in vision setting, but we need people who will help us in execution and realisation of that vision, and that is the role of the administrative wing of Parliament. We will pass this Schedule, but counties will go to The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}