The problem is that the national government as I see it today and as I saw it before the re-election of Jubilee, has never been fully committed to the devolution.
That is why you will see a Ministry like agriculture , the national government has no farm, has no farmers, but most of the allocation is stashed here.
The Ministry of Agriculture is procuring fertilizer to give to counties. Why you can’t they give money to those counties to do the same?
So money is not the problem, it is the wheel to implement the constitution to the letter and BBI intends to have it written in black-and-white, that what the counties are entitled to is 35%, so that there is no gray area, there is no pull and push between National Assembly and the senate about what is the entitlement of counties.
This is what needs to be written. If for instance this nation assuming we are under distress like we are now and we able to collect only 1 billion, let 35% be guaranteed as monies devolved to counties.
Let it not be a dancing figure which is disbursed at the wheel and win of somebody hiding behind a big desk in treasury, without knowing the suffering that we have in Counties.
So that is what BBI seeks to address among other things. If the cake is small, divide 35% of that small thing to counties.
Give Migori part of their 35% , give Homabay, give Kisumu, give Nairobi there is sustainability .
If you are a government running a program and you are not certain about the percentage you are entitled to then, you really cannot budget.
And we know that if you push the counties to be firm on own source revenue, that will be local taxation like here in Nairobi, what we pay for parking, you see all of us are complaining it’s too high.
It’s too high because Nairobi County government wants to catch up on own source revenue by raising is too high.
That is bad in our people and that is what we need to deal with.
