The National Budget for the Financial Year 2020/2021 unveiled by the Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury and Planning on 11th June 2020 is the clear declaration of how the nation’s taxpayers’ resources excluding the monies reserved for the Counties will be raised and distributed and expended by the national government. It is as it were how the national cake will be distributed to the people of Kenya. As the saying goes the devil is in the details. Indeed it should be that the saints are in the details.
Are we as a region, the people of the former Western Province in a position to meticulously read and dissect the National Budget and evaluate its social justice, equity, transparency as to where most of the monies budgeted in the National Government, Parliament and Judiciary will be expended and trace, compute how much of it will reach the region?
The Counties of the former Western Province of Kakamega, Bungoma, Busia, Vihiga, and neighbouring Trans Nzoia have a combined population of 6,012,184 people as per the 2019 National Census and so how much of the National Government, Parliament, Judiciary budgeted allocations totaling Kshs 18.1 billion for the Judiciary, Kshs. 37.3 billion for Parliament and Kshs 2,418.50 million for the National Government will be expended to the region?
A glance of the allocations in the sectors of Roads, Energy, Rail and Ports, ICT, Manufacturing, Affordable Decent Housing, the Judiciary, Parliament all inescapably point to the worrying scenario that those allocations will be applied around Nairobi, and its environs-Machakos, Kiambu, Makueni, Nakuru and Mombasa.
Equally disturbing is the clear over-allocation of budgetary resources to Nairobi County in violation of the County Revenue Allocation Bill so as to satisfy the President’s project under the Nairobi Metropolitan government, under the National Government. Our elected leaders seem clueless or plainly too lazy to deploy financial analysts economists to dissect the budget and show how unjust, unequal, and pitiful the three National Arms of Government budgetary allocation are aimed at reaching to our region. Instead of putting clear accurate figures of the manner in which the budget marginalizes the region, they specialize in or are trigger happy to spew out generalities that do not bring forth the grotesqueness of the rigging of the National Budget to benefit small populations in Nairobi-Nakuru-Machakos-Mombasa.
Get us persons who can intelligently interpret the National Budget and the mischief inherent in the same and you have leaders who are visionary and upto the task and therefore can fight from specifics.
The National Budget for 2020-2021 financial year does marginalize the Counties of the former Western Province and it’s a pity the elected leaders are unable to dissect and dramatize the marginalization by purchasing two pages of the Nation Newspaper and placing the elected leaders Advertisers message showing the outrageous concentration of Budgetary resources to selected areas of Kenya and all in total violation of the Constitution of Kenya. Old, archaic, strategies of fighting the Gerrymandering of the National Budget to benefit only a fraction of the population of Kenya will not work. They encourage the Budget riggers to continue marginalizing Western Kenya year in year out and because they know our leaders are clueless and have no means to scuttle and show case graphically the Marginalization.