Rotich to deliver Budget Statement Thursday

By MARGARET WAHITO | June 10, 2013

Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich to deliver the Budget Statement on Thursday. Photo/ FILE

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jun 10 – The National Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich is expected to deliver the 2013/2014 Budget Statement in Parliament this Thursday at 3pm.

The National Treasury confirmed that the Speaker of the National Assembly Justin Muturi has allowed the Cabinet Secretary to deliver the speech inside Parliament considering that he is not a Member of Parliament.

The Treasury had until the end of this month to present the Sh1.6 trillion budget, which must be delivered concurrently with the other East African countries which will present their national budgets on June 13.

The national government is expected to spend over Sh1.01 trillion of which Sh568.3 billion will be recurrent expenditure and Sh442.7 billion in development expenditure to ministries and government departments.

The county governments have been allocated Sh210 billion.

Despite the Treasury being able to meet the June 30 deadline, concerns have been raised that the whole budget process has been done in a rush due to delays caused by the March 4 elections and the leadership transition.

“For some reason, we are going to miss out in a big way especially on the requirement for public participation. Also the fact that the parliamentary budget committee didn’t have sufficient time to interrogate the budgets that have been put across by Parliament, Judiciary and the Executive,” said PKF Director Michael Mburuga during a forum on the 2013-14 budget forum in Nairobi.

“I would expect there would be mistakes here and there especially misallocation of funds but then, this is not the end of it. Parliament can still debate and make the necessary changes,” he added.

The Parliamentary Service Commission (PSC) is expected to be allocated Sh24 billion, Sh22 billion to the Judiciary and Sh210 billion to the county government.

Apart from elaborating on various key expenditure many would be looking out to see measures laid by the National Treasury to fund the budget considering the huge current deficit which stands at around Sh359.5 billion.

By March 31 this year, KRA had collected Sh560.4 billion and is expected to collect a further Sh278.5 billion by the end of this month to hit its target.