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{
    "id": 977425,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/977425/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 183,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Halake",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13184,
        "legal_name": "Abshiro Soka Halake",
        "slug": "abshiro-soka-halake"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Madam Temporary Speaker. Three minutes is too short for financial analysis, but thank you for giving me a chance. Every year we go through this, we have three minutes to discuss something as serious as the Budget Policy Statement, which is a tool of evaluation for the budgets that will be used for the rest of the year. I do not know if that is doing it justice. Let me just pick one issue because I cannot do too many things in three minutes. One of the issues that is of concern is the impact of the national debt on insurable revenue. There is Kshs89 billion that will be added onto the projections for this year. All of it has been allocated towards pensions and debt repayment on principal and interest. I suspect that perhaps it would mostly go to interest. The fact that the shareable revenue is affected so much by the national debt must be something of concern to this House. This is because it means that the national debt is what is coming in the way of us resourcing our counties and the service delivery at the local level. Madam Temporary Speaker, the sources that the National Treasury is putting as the source of revenue increment – the 2 per cent from the 1.84 per cent – are Income Tax and Value Added Tax (VAT). They are both declining in proportion to the ordinary revenue that we are targeting to collect. I wonder how realistic it is to project an amount of Ksh2.134 billion for projects that total revenue collection, when the fundamentals, which are the Income Tax and the VAT are actually declining. The only non-declining area we are told of is the non-income tax. We have not seen measures that have been put in place to get money from that source. Therefore, my worry is that we are projecting revenues that may not be realized. As this House, we need to really think through where county services will be funded from or where the growth will come from if we will create jobs or get people on board to be production centers rather can cost centers. Madam Temporary Speaker, there are also Conditional Grants. The framework for management of these grants continues to be a problem. I wonder what we will do about this because---."
}