Ranguma slashes health, agriculture budgets allocates himself Sh178m

Kisumu Governor Jack Ranguma has slashed health and agriculture budgets and instead increased allocation to his office by Sh178 million.

According to the County Fiscal Strategy Paper 2016, Ranguma has proposed to slash the health budget from 30.8 per cent in the current financial year (2015/2016) to 28.9 in the 2016/17 financial year.

This translates to a difference of nearly Sh100 million in the health budget where the recurrent expenditure has also grown from Sh2.1 billion to 2.26 billion while the development expenditure has dropped from Sh240 million to Sh200 million.

The allocation to the office of the governor and county administration will be increased by over Sh178 million with both recurrent and development expenditure increasing.

The increased allocation is set to give priority to improvement of service delivery through strengthening the sub-county and ward administration structures, establishing of community policing authority and promotion of public participation through engaging citizens.

This even happens despite health and agriculture being the newly devolved functions that have been facing a myriad of challenges since the inception of the devolved units.

Agriculture budgetary allocation is set to be slashed from 6.3 per cent to 5.6 but with recurrent expenditure reducing from Sh307 million to Sh286 million.

Other departments whose allocations will be increased are tourism, trade and heritage, industrialization, energy and enterprise development, education, finance and planning, lands and housing, communication and information technology.

Kisumu city council which has been starved of cash for the better part of this financial year faces another set-back as its budget is to be slashed by Sh15 million. Other departments that will have their budgets cut down will be county assembly, roads, transport and public works.

Nominated MCA Farida Salim expressed her disappointment with the governor claiming much of the health budgetary allocation has been going to recurrent expenditure and therefore it needed to be raised even more to cater for development.

Mrs Salim said currently the county government is planning to build new health facilities, but stressed that they will remain white elephants if they are not stocked or equipped due to lack of enough funds from the county government to the health docket.

"Many other programmes such as remuneration of community health workers that we passed in the assembly will be affected when the health budget is slashed," said Mrs Salim who is also the vice chair of the health committee in the assembly.

Mrs Salim added that there was a recommendation by teh assembly that every health facility in Kisumu to have a maternity wing stating that all these will not be achieved when the health budget is slashed.

"We recommended maternity wings to curb high maternal mortality rate. For a county to be productive we must have a healthy workforce thus we must invest more on health,"she said, adding that her committee will not allow the slashing of the health budget.

Under the reduced health budget for the FY 2016/17, Ranguma will give priority to activities aimed at scaling up primary health care services.

"Due to high disease burden already existing in the county, curative services will also be scale up," said the County Executive Committee member for finance and planning George Ongaya.

With the reduced allocation in agriculture, the county government still plans to improve the livestock sub-sector and realize its full potential through investing and partnerships in high quality genetic resource base, efficiency in production system, disease and pest control as well as livestock extension services.

Ranguma also plans to carry out law enforcement and sensitize fishers to engage in aquaculture in order to ease fishing pressure in Lake Victoria.