Ndindi Nyoro lectures govt on budget making, debt crisis

After months of political hibernation, which culminated with his ouster from the prestigious Budget and Appropriations committee, Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro is stealthily making a comeback, with guns blazing against his government.

Nyoro has broken his silence in style, spicing his scathing criticism with his deep understanding of the budget-making process to demonstrate the debt trap Kenya is in and the financial crisis it is heading into.

Nyoro said it is important for leaders to spend time dealing with deliverables around critical sectors, as well as choosing between managing politics and delivery.

“There is no better way of showing what you want to do than through budgetary allocations. If, for example, you know what you want to achieve is roads, healthcare or education, then just follow the budget and then check how much has been allocated, that will speak more than words,” he said.

According to Nyoro, there is need to define the orientation of a country and circumstances in the country now are real issues around security and management of people or in other areas like roads and other deliverables.

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“If for example, you increase the budget of Interior and see a significant increment and in that year, there is no recruitment happening, and if you go to the budget for development of that specific Ministry, there is no notable increment; that money is going into recurrent. Then ask yourself, this money is going into recurrent sectors, by law, which are not as transparent as others, then you need to make your deduction around there,” he explained.

He said budget making is not just about June or the date that the Treasury CS reads the highlights, but starts several months earlier and goes all the way into oversight and beyond June.

“In my experience as Chairman of the budget committee, the budget is not the one that we read, this is the hard truth. The budget of Kenya is called the Exchequer. The one we read remains there. We have a country with a discrepancy between what you budget for and how much you can raise as revenue,” he said.

“What we budget for is not the budget; what we fund for is the budget. Things I was seeing, some semantics about absorption… you need to juxtapose it from absorption to not funded. Those nice words about absorption basically mean more than 95 per cent of those programmes were not funded by the close of the financial year,” he added.

According to Nyoro, the duty to explain why programmes were not funded is left with the accounting officer while the overarching Ministry which is the National Treasury is left with no responsibility.

He stated that Kenya has two stagnant pillars in budget making, one is discretionary and the other is non-discretionary.

As the institutions of the State continue to solidify, he said the role of a leader gets diminished by the day, and so do budget-making organs.

“A huge proportion of the budget is non-discretionary and there is nothing you can do about it. So, you are sitting there as the leader championing budget making but up to what point can you exercise your mind?” he stated.

Nyoro said salaries for public servants are between Sh600 billion – Sh700 billion. There is also a constitutional requirement of funding counties to a tune of at least Sh400 billion and all these responsibilities have to be catered for.

At the end of the day, he said the country ends up with a kitty known as the development budget of about Sh700 billion, which over the years is just an aspiration.

“You budget Sh700 billion and by the end of the financial year, you are less in revenue collection by Sh300 billion. You cannot cut payment of interest rates, you cannot cut CFS or salaries. So, when the Treasury receives revenue, they fund all those other things as priority and the last to be funded is development,” he said.

He said the budget-making process continues to be decimated.

The Kiharu MP described Kenya’s debt situation as the country’s greatest threat.

“I do not think we are taking the seriousness of this matter the way it should, and I also do not think those who are responsible are communicating enough about the problem we have about debt. When you are in a hole, there are many ways you can get out but one of the ways you cannot get out is to continue digging that hole,” he said.