Ruto, governors' summit offers space to strengthen devolution

President William Ruto with Council of Governors during consultative meeting in Naivasha ,Nakuru county on February 10,2023. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

It is always surprising that the headlines in our budgeting process focus on only one of our 48 governments; the national one. Without scandals, we tend to ignore our 47 county governments.

Which is probably why we hear little real debate around the proposed national and county equitable shares for the forthcoming 2023/24 fiscal year. As we head into a National and County Government Coordinating Summit ("The Summit", comprising the president and all 47 governors) over the next couple of days, disagreements between and across multiple parties on this equitable share will dominate the order of business, or at least that is what our media wants us to believe.

To quickly recap, the Council of Governors (CoG) recently opposed two recommendations on the overall 2023/24 equitable share for all counties. The first one - from the Commission of Revenue Allocation (CRA) as an apparently non-binding advisory - came in at Sh407 billion. If the correct timelines were followed, then this would suggest that the National Treasury ignored this number when preparing its currently draft Budget Policy Statement (BPS) and its own recommendation was a total equitable share of Sh380 billion, or Sh27 billion (seven per cent) less than CRA's.