The national budget has been read, the ninth one since the promulgation of the current Constitution. It is the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh financial years under the devolved system of government. And the budget has, naturally, been growing in terms of the amounts allocated and spent.
In the 2013/2014 financial year, the first budget in which county administrations were allocated money to run the newly formed units, the overall expenditure was estimated at Sh1640.9 billion. In today’s, the figure hit over Sh3 trillion almost double that at the onset of devolution. Many factors have contributed to the ballooning trend in our national budget, or any other budget, over time. These factors include expanding needs, inflation, global economic trends and population growth, among others.
The taxpayer, the main funder of the national budget, has consistently been digging deeper and deeper every passing year. But it seems some people in the two levels of government, especially the devolved units, are hell-bent to keep biting off, chewing and swallowing the very hand that feeds them. Reports indicate that there are businesspeople that supplied counties with goods and services in their first year of being but are yet to be paid.
We are talking seven years here.
Majority of businesses in the country are run on capital borrowed from banks, some take years of saving and selling family assets to finance. It is therefore near homicidal for a client to fail to pay up for supplies in time.
The pressure that delay puts on a business and the family of its owners can push them to early graves. It is near-massacre if that client affects so many suppliers as governments, both county and national, do.
It is estimated that by the beginning of this month, the two levels of government owed suppliers over Sh300 billion cumulatively. This is money that has been accrued over the seven years the devolved system has been in place. And that is the principal owed and the only sum the traders hope to ever recover.
The unfortunate fact, however, is that the traders are accruing interests charged by financial institutions on the capital they borrowed as time passes by. It is not difficult to imagine the amount a trader who borrowed Sh1 million in 2014 to finance his business, for instance, owes the lending bank today with the current high interest rates our banks are charging.
One can easily tell what is driving the tens of pages of auctioneer adverts in our newspapers day after day, the attendant high rates of suicide and stress related deaths, not to mention the breaking up families.
But there is some light at the end of this long dark tunnel.
In his Madaraka Day speech early this month, President Uhuru Kenyatta acknowledged this problem and directed the government he leads to do all it can to make sure all pending bills are paid in the shortest time possible.
The President first admitted that it was practically impossible to keep boasting of growth in the economy while the drivers of that same economy continue being pushed out of business.
But why are governors and other accounting officers in government killing fellow countrymen and women without blinking an eye? Why do people we call leaders swim in opulence while the people giving them the wealth starve to death?
There is only one way forward in ending this tragedy: make it mandatory that payments are made within a certain reasonable and fixed time frame, and hold accounting officers personally and criminally responsible in case of breach.
In the meantime, Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich should follow through his threat of not releasing a dime to any government agency or county that has not honoured pending bills, until they comply.
