No money for development as eating county chiefs gobble up just about everything

I hear ten of the 47 governors did not spend a cent in development projects in recent months, according to an audit by the Controller of Budget. I don’t find that surprising. Actually, I’m surprised that anyone was offended by that.

Why, county governments have been turned into employment bureaus and those with any levers of power are using them to create jobs for their kith and kin.

When governors are not creating a “conducive” environment for their networks to do business, they venture abroad for benchmarking, which is a euphemism for loitering with the singular intent of falsifying stipend claims.

A friend from Uganda narrated how hard up legislators from that country devised a plot that guaranteed each of them at least two international benchmarking trips so that they could recoup a bit of money, after most of their cash was docked off to pay mortgages and other financial commitments. But even such trips have to be organised and a host willing to receive guests, identified.

It emerged that the only available country that hadn’t been utilised in benchmarking was Afghanistan.

One desperate Ugandan lawmaker said he was willing to go there. But when the logistics of a trip there proved too difficult, he agreed to lie low and pretend to be out of the country for two weeks, after which he emerged to claim his allowances.

One might say as long as no governor is in jail for breaching the constitutional threshold that demands they devote 35 per cent of their budgets to development, it’s a safe bet that we have not heard the last of those eating chiefs.