President Uhuru Kenyatta has directed the Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA), the Council of Governors, the National Treasury and the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to form a multi-agency team and set up a single revenue collection system, which will be integrated with the national government system and that can be used across all 47 Counties. The President noted that between the County governments and the national government, 11 different revenue collection systems, and that this has severely limited the amount of revenue collected by the national government and also by the Counties, saying that the move is set to limit the duplication of efforts and waste of resources.
Speaking when he received the report on the Joint National and Resource Mapping project at the KICC, Nairobi, the President lauded the success that has been witnessed throughout government from the multi-agency approach, and a number of projects prove that, including LAPSSET, SGR, Blue Economy, counter-terrorism, anti-graft war among others, “This shows the multi-agency model is an effective strategy that must be deployed across the full spectrum of government,” he affirmed. He added the joint taskforce that will deal with the single revenue collection system should take into account the work of the joint mapping national taskforce.
Talking about the mapping project, the Head of State said it’s vital for the Kenyans to know where we are and the resources we have because for too long, Kenya has relied on inaccurate and outdated maps, some of them were put together before independence. He said we’ve had to also rely on data sourced from private entities which was expensive and inconsistent and not standardized. The entire project was estimated to cost Kshs 7 billion, but through pooling of resources, the cost has been cut to Kshs 2 billion. Moreover, projections had indicated that the production of a single map sheet would cost Kshs Kshs 148 million, but the multi-agency team in charge of the project produced them for Kshs 70,000 each.