National Treasury should disburse county funds

The Council of Governors (CoG) Chairman Martin Wambora says the National Treasury has not released Sh52 billion due to counties for the months of January and February 2021.

Such blame is not new. Time and again, the CoG has laid blame on the Treasury for the inability of counties to function maximally due to Treasury’s failure to disburse funds in a timely manner.

Last year while the National Assembly and Senate were arguing over the Division of Revenue Bill, governors warned that counties would grind to a halt if funds were not made available to them by September 2020.

In October 2020, CoG went to court in an attempt to compel the Treasury to release at least 50 per cent of the Sh316 billion equitable allocation. While that should have set things in motion and allowed for the consequent smooth disbursement of funds to counties, the opposite seems to obtain.

We can’t tell why there has been a delay in the disbursement of the funds, but devolution to succeed, we urge Treasury to release the funds.

Ideally, counties are supposed to supplement Treasury allocations by raising revenue in their own jurisdictions. However, the collections are meagre, which means Treasury must ensure timely disbursement of funds to the counties to keep them running.

County governments, on their part, have a duty to plug holes through which they lose revenue as well as reduce wastage. While a bigger part of the money due to counties should go to development expenditure, most of it ends up as recurrent expenditure.

Besides, successive Auditor General reports have shown that counties do not exercise prudent fiscal management. The 2019 report, for instance, showed that Sh81 billion could not be accounted for.