Kenya Parliament's Budget office wants State-funded projects regulated

The national government should be barred from starting fresh projects until the ongoing ones have been completed, a parliamentary report has said.

The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which advices legislators on budget matters, says in a report that even with focus on the on going projects alone, the Government will still have a Sh1.9 trillion shortfall to complete them at the end of the year.

The national government is currently undertaking about 1,109 capital projects whose total cost amounts to Sh4.2 trillion. The economic sector has the highest number of projects at 450 while the energy infrastructure and ICT has the projects with the highest cost totaling Sh2.1 trillion.

Hired experts

According to the Budget Office, most of these projects are to be completed between 2015/16 and 2017/18. The experts hired by Parliament estimate that the Government would have spent Sh1.6 trillion on these projects by June 2015 indicating only 38 per cent of these projects would be completed. This puts the balance required to complete all the on-going projects at Sh2.6 trillion.

However, a review of the expenditure estimates for the 2015/16 budget indicate that the Government has only set aside Sh721 billion for capital expenditure. According to the 40-page report, Unpacking the Budget Estimates, 2015/16, if no new projects are introduced in 2015/16, the balance needed to complete ongoing project after 2015/16 is Sh1.9 trillion.

A breakdown of the projects by sectors indicates that the energy, infrastructure and ICT sector as well as the economic sector, which includes agriculture, water and the industrialisation sectors among others, will have bulk of the unfinished projects.

Considering the rate of allocation of capital funds in 2015/16, the report notes, it will take about three years to complete all on-going projects. Bulk of the capital funding will have to be redirected to the Energy Infrastructure and ICT sector and the Economic sector. The Parliament’s budget team wants Government to implement its own guidelines for sharing out development expenditure as captured in the Budget Policy Statement (BPS) 2015 that prioritises ongoing projects and indicates that emphasis should be given to their completion.

“In this regard, the Government should not undertake any new projects in 2015/16 and the medium term until the current ongoing projects are finalised,” the report notes.

Key promises

Should Parliament implement the recommendations, then the Government could be headed for a clash with National Assembly given that the Jubilee administration is yet to implement other key promises among them the development of new sports stadium.

The report has also said there was lack of evidence on whether the public was involved in preparation of the estimates by the National Government, Parliament and the Judiciary.

Over the last two years Parliament has been recommending that the budgetary transfers to State corporations be further broken down. “However, this has not been done and this undermines the Constitutional principle of openness and transparency in financial matters,” the report reads in part.