Governors sue Senators for tampering with budget ceilings

The Council of Governors (COG) has moved to the High Court seeking to reverse a decision by Senate to amend budget ceilings for counties by giving county assemblies an extra 2.5 billion shillings in the new financial year.

The council also wants the court to order that upper limits for county budget be based on proposals by Commission for Revenue Allocation (CRA) until the petition is heard and determined.

In their petition, governors argue by setting the last minute ceilings for county assemblies and executives, senators violated the constitutional mandate of county assemblies.

The council chaired by Meru Governor Peter Munya has further argued that Senate lacks powers to impose ceilings on county governments as they can only be set by CRA.

The petition will be heard on July 9th, 2015.

This comes even as the Treasury accused the Council of Governors of hypocrisy and failing to utilize more than 31 billion shillings allocated to county governments.

Principal Secretary Dr Kamau Thugge said adequate funds have been disbursed to counties despite governors’ claims that critical services have been crippled due to lack of funds.

The National Treasury, through Thugge says as at 16^th June, it had disbursed Ksh 196.9B to the counties, that includes Ksh 1.55B as conditional grants to level 5 hospitals and Ksh 733.6M from the government of Denmark for health services in county governments.

According to the National Treasury’s statistics, Turkana, Makueni, Kitui and Kilifi counties led in the category of devolved units that had the largest amount of uncollected funds at the Central Bank of Kenya.

Siaya, Nakuru and Kwale counties have more than Ksh 1B still lying at the CBK accounts, while Embu, Bungoma, Meru, Kisumu and Marsabit had more than Ksh 800M that remained unclaimed.

Vihiga, Nairobi, Machakos, Bomet and Kiambu counties had the least amount of uncollected funds.

County governments have been allocated Ksh 287B in the 2015/16 financial year, at least Ksh 45B more than they were allocated in the 2014/15 financial year that came to a close at the end of June.