District Commissioners follow proceedings during the close of a past induction course at Harambee House. Photo/FILE
By WACHIRA KANGARU wkangaru@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Thursday, August 18 2011 at 22:30
Posted Thursday, August 18 2011 at 22:30
Offices currently occupied by the Provincial Administration could be turned over to governors.
Treasury permanent secretary Joseph Kinyua said this would help cut the cost of funding devolved governments.
Mr Kinyua also disclosed that the allocations from the central government could exceed the budgeted 15 per cent of all revenue collected. (Read: It’s back to school for governors, MPs)
This, the Treasury notes, will largely reflect the expanded role the county governments are expected to play once the devolved structure takes shape.
Ministries are reviewing their structures to identify the roles to be transferred to the county governments with the corresponding funding obligations.
“The roles transferred to county governments have to be matched with funds to facilitate execution of the roles,” Mr Kinyua said on Thursday in Nairobi.
In entrenching devolution of powers, the new Constitution provides that the national government should allocate at least 15 per cent of all revenue it collects to the counties.
The law also allows the national government to either conditionally or unconditionally allocate additional funding to counties.
New measures
The review will then be shared with the Commission on Revenue Allocation, which will be free to adopt the recommendations or use them to inform its own study on financing of county governments.
At present, the Constitution has explicitly devolved provision of health and agriculture services to counties.
There is also a growing preference to devolve education services to county governments, and with it devolve money to finance the free primary and secondary education programme and teachers’ salaries. The government spends more than Sh43 billion to finance the two annually.
Projects being undertaken under the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) and Local Authority Transfer Fund (LATF), currently targeting local authorities, will also be decentralised.
“As it is in this Constitution there is no mention of CDF or LATF. Our interpretation at this point is that these two will have to be discontinued,” Mr Kinyua added.
To take care of the ongoing projects under the two funds, the government increased the kitties in this financial year.
However, some of the projects could be completed under the Urban Centres and Cities Bill.
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