Sunday, July 21, 2013

TNA, ODM to get lion’s share of Sh205m parties’ fund

RPP’s Lucy Ndung’u with IEBC’s Hassan and CEO Oswago when they appeared before the Parliamentary Justice and Legal Affairs Committee on June 4. [PHOTO: BONIFACE OKENDO/STANDARD]
By Jacob Ng’etich
NAIROBI, KENYA: All indications are that the lion’s share of the Sh205 million in the political parties’ kitty will be shared between the National Alliance ( TNA) and the Orange Democratic Movement ( ODM).
This is because the sharing formula is based on the ratio of presidential votes garnered by the candidates of political parties in the last General Election.
This effectively puts the small parties that coalesced around TNA and ODM at risk of being short-changed.
According to Senate Majority Whip Beatrice Elachi, the small parties are likely to lose out if the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission ( IEBC) does not devise a better way of sharing the funds.
“If they share the money using only the presidential results, it will be difficult for the small parties to make claims even though the presidential candidates got votes from their strongholds,” said Elachi.
Politicians say there will be disputes unless the two parties agree to share the money with their coalition partners. The formula for distributing the funds gives political parties that field a presidential candidate an advantage over those that only contest other positions.
Speaking on phone from Namibia where she is attending the Commonwealth Parliamentary meeting, Senator Elachi said the small parties would be at the mercy of ODM and TNA if the issues are not properly handled.
Party strength
In an interview with The Standard on Sunday, the Registrar of Political Parties ( RPP) Lucy Ndung’u said her office was finalising how much each eligible party will get from the fund.
Ndung’u said they will use the aggregate sum of the votes each party got in the election to calculate how much they will take home.
“The money will be distributed according to the strength of the parties in the just concluded General Election, just like the Political Parties Act stated,” said Ndung’u.
She said parties in alliances will share the money calculated from the presidential elections based on their pre and not post-elections deals.
“When they presented their agreements, each party detailed how they will share their funds. We will not, however, include the post-poll agreements unless the parties agree to do so of their own volition,” said Ndung’u.
She said her office had received Sh205 million from the Treasury to be shared among political parties that participated in the elections.
“We requested the 0.3 per cent of the revenue but Treasury allocated us Sh25 million less than what we received last year,” she said.
Kenya Revenue Authority Director General John Njiraini this week said the Government collected over Sh800 billion last year.
Therefore, the political parties, were entitled to about Sh2.4 billion (0.3 per cent of the total revenue).
Tongaren MP Eseli Simiyu said the little money allocated to the political parties was a ploy by the Government to bring down the opposition.
“Those in Jubilee have Government resources and machinery to reach where they want. But how will our party leaders get to reach the common mwananchi  with such little funds, which are not even enough to maintain their offices across the country?” Simiyu said, speaking to The Standard on Sunday recently.
Binding agreements
The battle over the funds will likely cause splits between the Jubilee and CORD affiliate parties.
Only two other parties – the United DemocraticForum and the United Republican Party – are believed to be in the running for a significant share of the funds.
Elachi said the provisions to ensure smaller parties get funds by merely meeting registration requirements or supporting a joint presidential candidate were dropped from the law two years ago, giving rise to the current problem.
But Ndung’u insisted that only political parties with binding coalition deals on funding are protected.
Franklin Bett, who co-chaired former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s presidential campaign, said their agreement with other CORD parties did not include sharing of resources.
€œWe were only concerned with ODM, but would lend a hand where the other parties were handicapped financially. The issue  has to be sorted out. This callsfor an urgent meeting,” he said recently.
CORD affiliates in Parliament include ODM, Wiper Democratic Movement (WDM), Ford-Kenya and five other parties.
Former Cherangany MP and a URP founder member, Joshua Kutuny, said the deal between TNA and URP covers funding.
“Once the Registrar of Political Parties decides on the figures, the rest will not be a problem,” he said. “We already know that TNA will get more money than URP because it has more MPs than us.”
Kutuny estimates the ratio as “likely to be 55:45 of the total allocation”.
IEBC chairman Issack Hassan on Thursday presented the final results of the 2013 General Election to Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs. IEBC said 12,221,053 people voted in the presidential contest but noted that there was a difference in the figures of those who voted for the other seats.
Elachi said it would be unfair to distribute the funds based on the aggregate amount because only 12 million people voted.

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