An aerial view of Outering Road as seen from Donholm. Picture taken on December 28, 2018. [Phillip Orwa, Standard]
State departments offering critical services including food production are among the laggards in spending, which partly explains why the huge national budget does not trickle down.
Billions of shillings allocated in development budgets remain idle, possibly in bank accounts, rather than being deployed to areas with the highest impact to the ordinary mwananchi.
With only two weeks to the end of the financial year, budget utilisation should be approaching 90 per cent, barring any significant budget reviews occasioned by unforeseen events – but is less than half of that for most projects.
The Teachers Service Commission, which employs tutors, had not spent a cent of its Sh136 million allocated for projects, while the Fisheries department had only exhausted a quarter of the Sh2.2 billion set aside.
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Fisheries has been identified as a key plank in attaining food security, one of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Big Four development agenda besides universal healthcare, manufacturing and affordable housing.
Irrigation, another enabler for agriculture, had only spent Sh2.5 billion of the Sh5.8 billion allocated and approved last year by both the National Treasury and Parliament.
And to indicate the dissonance in policy, there was full utilisation of the funds set aside for agricultural research whose mandate includes control of diseases and improvement of animal and plant genetics.
This means, while there are better seeds that should produce higher yields, there is no support to guarantee harvests through irrigation.
In contrast, it is the big-ticket infrastructural projects such as energy, roads and rail that recorded bigger absorption of budgets but whose impact is not immediate.
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The Industrialisation ministry, which should support the manufacturing pillar, had spent 58 per cent of its development budget, ahead of health at 54 per cent.
Housing was among the best performing departments with 98 per cent of its development budget used up.
An analysis that captures the actual spending of the various ministries released by the National Treasury for the period ending April 30 helps paint the picture of a slant against issues close to the heart of the masses.
Energy (electricity generation and transmission at Sh20 billion) and transport (railway at Sh10.8 billion) projects are among the departments that had used at least 80 per cent of their development allocations with two months to the end of the financial year.
But the respective impact to the ordinary household in lower electricity prices and cheaper transport is likely to be realised many years down the line – if at all.
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Reported military spending on development is nil but this could be explained by the secrecy that is associated with acquisition of arms across the world.
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