Nairobi City County enacted a Ksh. 32 billion shillings budget for the year which commenced today 1st July, 2018. A total of Ksh. 21.1 billion will be spent on recurrent expending and the reminder spent on development.
Citizen Television has an interview with Charles Kerich who is the acting County Executive Committee (CEC) Member for Finance for Nairobi city County. He informed the media house that Nairobi City County will raise an equivalent of Ksh. 15 billion from own sources of revenue and equitable share from the national government is valued at Ksh. 17 billion.
Charles Kerich blamed the prolonged electioneering period for the under-performance on own revenue collection in Nairobi County.
Initially Nairobi City County had set out a budget of Ksh. 34 billion. This was reduced after the Nairobi County Assembly slashed it to Ksh. 32 billion which is reported to be more realistic.
During the interview, Charles Kerich pointed out that there are a lot of loopholes in the local revenue streams which need to be sealed.
The Office of the Governor and Deputy Governor takes 14% of the total budget. This is the third largest allocation when measured as a percentage of the total budget. Most of this budget will be spent on salaries of county employees. Nairobi County has 13,000 employees and the Public Service Management is a department under the office of the governor.
Nairobi County is aiming to seal loopholes and reduce unnecessary spending in order to deliver more to the city residents. In the budget for FY 2017/2018, Nairobi had set aside Ksh. 1 billion to be spent on voluntary earlier retirement. This was because majority of county employees are about to retire and it was expected that they would opt for earlier retirement.
In the next 10 years, over half of these 13,000 employees would have retired. The surprising part is that the majority of the existing employees are not skilled.
Currently, Nairobi City County is in debt to a tune of Ksh. 58 billion. The biggest creditors are: LAPTRUST and LAPFUND. These were statutory organizations which used to deal with pension of state employees and Nairobi has a large number of state officers.
Once the employees take their early retirement, they become a responsibility of the agencies responsible for pensions.
The Kenya National Treasury has written to the Nairobi City County government government acknowledging that the national government owes the county Ksh. 8.2 billion.
Watch out for more updates in the next articles.
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