Senator Ledama Olekina of Narok has urged Parliament to include citizens in the budget-making process to establish impartial and equitable frameworks that benefit Kenyans.
Olekina stated that most Kenyans, including the county governments, are left out of the budget-making processes and ultimately impacted by the predetermined financial structures. She acknowledged that Parliament is always careless with public participation.
"It is important for Parliament to listen to the ground during budget-making policy. We do not take public participation seriously; it is imperative that we engage the citizens. We don't always know it all," he said, speaking with Citizen TV on Tuesday.
Even though simplifying the budget-making process is essential, Olekina pointed out that resource mismanagement—which fuels the desire for increased budget allocation—is a more significant problem.
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"The problem we have even with the Executive is that so often we find that the mismanagement and poor policies leads to poor budget performance, and midway, we always come up with supplementary budgets," he said.
He claims that since ministry officers find the auditing procedures tiresome, the Treasury always repeats budget allocations for national development projects and never reviews them.
"Treasury does simply cut and paste because it is a lot of work; people don't want to write so much, so they cut and paste on the budget policy," he said.
"If we really care about the future of this country we start to look at things completely differently. Treasury should not want to control everything as much as the budget is concerned."
Additionally, he asserted that the Treasury modifies its yearly budgets in response to requests from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
When Parliament reconvenes today, it will discuss the main points of the budget policy statement and the distribution of resources.
This occurred after December 2023 saw the public debt reach Ksh.11.1 trillion.
The Affordable Housing Bill 2023 and the reconstitution of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) are the other issues the House is scheduled to discuss.
