To boost development, misuse of public funds must stop

Despite numerous reports by the Auditor General raising questions about how counties spend funds, wastage within the devolved units continues unchecked.

The 2016/2017 audit report shines the spotlight on counties where Sh143 million spent on personal allowances cannot be properly accounted for.

After devolution was introduced, rather than work diligently to serve the people, Members of County Assembly (MCAs) discovered ways through which they could make easy money from the public coffers.

Indeed, county accounting officers, in actual sense the governors, have had, and continue to experience undue pressure from MCAs. Governors who have put their feet down in checking the excesses of MCAs have not only been threatened with impeachment, but have had to shelve key public projects after MCAs refused to pass their budgets. This was the case with Makueni County when Governor Kivutha Kibwana stood his ground.

MCAs are notorious for drawing false sitting allowances and demanding foreign travel expenses for benchmarking purposes. The obsession with foreign travel hit fever pitch in 2015, prompting some European countries to declare our MCAs unwelcome guests in their respective countries. So bad was the situation that after having spent Sh4.9 billion on domestic and foreign travel in the 2013/2014 financial year, MCAs proceeded to spend Sh5.71 billion in the first nine months of the 2014/2015 financial year.

The infighting we see within counties, the latest cases being Kisumu, Kakamega, Nyandarua and Nairobi are basically over control of resources. Where speakers of county assemblies have refused unreasonable demands from MCAs, they suddenly find themselves facing of all manner of accusations from MCAs.

This bodes ill for the country, for rather than allocating funds for development, most of this money, as has been decried by Senator Gideon Moi, ends up being spent on recurrent expenditure, paying salaries and allowances.

That is not what devolution envisaged; it was about bringing services closer to the people and equitable distribution of the national cake. As it turns out, what devolution has achieved is devolving corruption and misuse of public funds to the counties.

This level of wastage is clearly not acceptable, particularly when schools need infrastructure; public hospitals need medical stores and medicines in their pharmacies, but funds that would have made the purchases end up in the pockets of a few greedy individuals.