Kitui County Assembly held public participation for the 2022/2023 Budget estimates that originated from the County Executive which is led by Governor Charity Ngilu.
The vice-chairman of the Budget and Appropriation Committee James Munuve who is also Kanziko Ward MCA presided over the exercise where residents were drawn from all the 40 wards of Kitui county. Munuve commended the residents for their active participation in the exercise as he revealed that most of the residents were not contented with how the executive has been using the money approved by the County Assembly.
The residents lamented that service delivery especially in the health sector was still a challenge to them.
Speaking after the exercise, Munuve stated, “We have had an interactive session where we have taken the residents through the budget which they had already done public participation with the county executive. They have brought their views on all the sectors and I would like to thank them because they have given us a lot of feedback which we will combine before presenting to sectoral committees of the County Assembly.”
The reports will then be presented to the sectoral committees. Each sector will look into the report and factor in the inputs that the residents presented and then get back to the budget committee. The budget committee will then combine all the reports from the sectors and memorandum.
Budget estimates of 11.6 billion were presented to the residents by the County Assembly Budget Committee and the committee also revealed that they will be expecting the budget to increase due to estimated revotes before the final budget.
“The total for development is 3.5 billion which is 30 percent of the whole budget, and the recurrent for salaries is 2.2 billion. The residents have given their ideas and the area that they want to be given a top priority is the health sector saying that money is allocated yet there are health facilities without drugs. The other area they focused on was the water sector which is allocated 360 million to be used for the water sector yet there are no water projects in their wards,” MCA Munuve added.
The residents asked the executive before presenting the budget to them to first list down the projects that they will be doing instead of issuing fake promises to them.
The committee also revealed that the other issue raised by the residents was about ECDE classrooms, especially after the introduction of the CBC Curriculum and they suggested that instead of the one classroom that is constructed by the County Government, it should be increased.
“We would like the budget to allocate more money to the CLIDP projects because they are the ones that we see working as they are equally distributed across the 40 wards,” One of the residents suggested.
The pro-poor bursary was also suggested to be increased especially that this year there will be two KNEC Exams and a CBC exam thus the parents will be requiring more fees for the county to attain 100 percent transition.
