Reports of a looming cash crunch in the counties have dominated headlines in the recent past. This followed reports of doctors fleeing the counties in search of greener pastures in private practice or choosing to bid time, pursuing higher education.
Evidently, what was hailed as an antidote to the much-maligned central government is under strain. There are all indications that matters will get worse after the government capitulated to IMF conditions on budget expenditure and taxations, including the fixing of interest rates.
The writing is on the wall: Times are tough and counties should brace themselves for lean times ahead. What this means is that millions of citizens will forfeit vital services and development projects will stall, with other planned ones entirely getting shelved.
On the dark side, it means more labour unrest, as employees protest against delays in salaries and other fat allowances. The current situation highlights the folly of relying on the Exchequer for fundsand two, on priotisation of non-core expenditure.
Indeed some of the counties are in a quandary because they failed to plan and manage what funds they found in the county coffers as spelt out under the Public Finance Management Act.
Damning reports from the Director of Budgeting and the Auditor General demonstrate how counties have become new centres for wastage and imprudent expenditure. That should not be the case. At its inception in 2013, counties held great promise for the country. And with at least Sh1 trillion spent, there is no denying that a lot has changed in the countryside and that is why the whole concept was considered the jewel of the 2010 Constitution.
But it could have been better, were it not that a lot of time and money was spent on trips abroad (to benchmark) and sprucing up offices and having an extra vehicle to take the county First Lady to a shopping excursion in the nearby trading centre.
The cash-crunch should provide the counties with vital lessons. The first is that it is foolhardy to wait for the fruit to fall off from the skies. That won’t happen. Instead, they should explore more ways to raise funds to finance their activities. The second is that the counties should make prudent use of what little, if any, they get from the National Treasury.
They should also bolster initiatives to collect revenue from the locality by making doing business easy, especially for SMEs and farmers. Other initiatives include promoting value addition to agricultural products like happens in Makueni and Kitui counties.
This will ultimately broaden the revenue base. Additionally, the counties could operationalise regional economic blocks to leverage on the synergy created.
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