Find lasting solution to county funding feuds
What you need to know:
- Whereas the Senate has acted on a point of law, the question of revenue division requires sober discussion.
- It is most likely that the National Assembly will seek to flex its muscles when it comes to debating conditional grants.
The debate about financial allocation to counties has always been contentious due to lack of clarity in law as well as turf wars. Every year, the Senate and the National Assembly have to fight back and forth before deciding on the amounts to be disbursed to the counties.
Last year, it took the intervention of President Uhuru Kenyatta to unlock a stalemate that delayed cash disbursement to the devolved units and caused their paralysis for months.
This time round, the Senate has approved the allocations but differed with the National Assembly, again over the amounts. Whereas the National Assembly approved a lumpsum of Sh409 billion that comprised equitable share and conditional grants, the Senate has slashed that by about Sh40 billion.
The Senate hence only approved Sh370 billion for equitable share, in conformity with a High Court ruling that decreed that the Revenue Division Act does not include conditional grants.
Resource allocation
In simple terms, the Revenue Division Act strictly applies to the equitable shares that is allocated to counties based on a formula provided by the Commission for Revenue Allocation.
Conditional grants, on the other hand, are given to disadvantaged counties and the objective is to cushion them and redress historical socioeconomic injustices meted out on them.
Accordingly, the Court ruled that this should be allocated based on a separate intergovernmental framework.
Whereas the Senate has acted on a point of law, the question of revenue division requires sober discussion. We have not seen the last of the dispute; it is most likely that the National Assembly will seek to flex its muscles when it comes to debating conditional grants. And when there is a dispute, counties suffer.
The point is that the National Assembly and the Senate should jointly and collaboratively work on the finer details of the law to provide clarity on the allocation of resources to the counties. We need to bring an end to this perennial contestation over resource allocation that sucks so much energy and creates unnecessary animosity in the country.
