Treasury accused of scuttling devolution
The Treasury wants to scuttle devolution of power and resources to the county governments, Commission for Revenue Allocation boss Micah Cheserem said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a meeting with the House Budget Committee, also attended by Finance Minister Njeru Githae and his technocrats, Mr Cheserem said the Treasury had failed to adopt a formula approved by Parliament for making allocations to the counties.
“If the Treasury behaves the way it is doing now, we’ll not have county governments,” Mr Cheserem told the MPs.
Not an accountant
He said Mr Githae “was not an accountant” and was therefore at the mercy of the mandarins at the Treasury who often “misled him”.
Accusing Mr Githae of ignoring the formula on revenue sharing, he said all counties should be allocated Sh30 billion to do their jobs.
He said the Sh6.8 billion that the Treasury had allocated had no basis in law. “The danger is that if we don’t do this well, we will have lots of complaints when governors come into office,” Mr Cheserem said.
“It is not true that the minister has used the formula. He has not! We told the Treasury that they have to apply the formula and allocate Sh30 billion to the counties as a minimum for the last four months of the financial year. If that doesn’t happen, wait for a crisis,” the CRA chairman declared.
Mr Githae said the Treasury had settled on the Sh6.8 billion “on the advice of the Transitional Authority”.
But an officer from the authority who was at the meeting later said it had not given the Treasury any figures.
The committee, however, refused to take the officer’s statement into account as the Transitional Authority was not invited to the meeting.
MPs did not spare the minister and accused him of skipping three meetings to discuss Bills on devolution.
“We have a feeling if you had your way, you’d not have had a meeting with us to discuss these Bills,” said Mr Elias Mbau, the chairman of the Budget Committee.
