Under the County Allocation Revenue Act 2018 the law sets the Budget ceilings on what the Counties are to spend on recurrent expenditure for the 2018-2019 financial year. Recurrent expenditure is what is used to pay salaries, allowances, benefits like medical, travelling allowance, maintenance of vehicles, rent, stationery–generally being what it costs a taxpayer for the County Governments Public Servants, Governor, Deputy Governor, Members of the County Assembly to govern, discharge their constitutional duties of serving the citizens of the County.
The balance of the financial allocation of the County Government is to go to development, the actual delivery of services to the people in the County. That development budget is equally vulnerable to abuse by those same elected leaders and County public servants charged to implement it. It has to be monitored so that it serves you and me.
The following are the details of the ceilings for the recurrent expenditure for the Counties of the former Western Province and Trans Nzoia County.
County | Equitable share of revenue raised nationally | County Government | County Assembly |
Bungoma | 8,949,000,000.00 | 533,956,683.00 | 629,104,073.00 |
Busia | 5,966,000,000.00 | 435,973,669.00 | 371,628,470.00 |
Kakamega | 10,330,600,000.00 | 1,006,978,228.00 | 702,938,880.00 |
Vihiga | 4,407,200,000.00 | 385,053,522.00 | 521,729,257.00 |
Trans Nzoia | 5,620,600,000.00 | 423,000,418.00 | 604,932,474.00 |
Total | 35,273,400,000.00 | 2,784,962,520.00 | 2,830,333,154.00 |
It is incumbent upon the residents of each County to interrogate what the recurrent expenditure the County Governments and County Assemblies are spending those monies on, whether those expenses are reasonable or unreasonable, who supplies the goods and services for those they purchase.
It is imperative that the County Government and County Assemblies are compelled to show cause why they cannot reduce their recurrent expenditures in the next financial year. For every cent that goes to recurrent expenditure, the citizen is the poorer. How many are the public servants, and elected leaders in each County to justify gobbling up over a billion shillings each financial year for a County Government and County Assembly. If we do not set a prudent cost to governance, all our taxpayers’ resources will go towards the comfort, welfare, well-being, plunder by hardly one percent (1%) of the population of a County being the elected leaders at County level and public servants at the County Government and County Assembly.
It is consigning our Counties to eternal under development if we do not set pragmatic levels of what goes into recurrent expenditure. Accountability must be the watch word. It is only those taxpayers’ resources we have to transform the lives of everyone in a County. Those to whom we delegate, to govern us cannot be allowed to eat all of our resources in recurrent expenditure and plunder through development projects structured to facilitate theft. The electorate must watch keenly what their taxpayers’ resources are doing or we are doomed to be ravaged by poverty, unemployment, disease and ignorance.