Kenya to seek Parliament approval on Sh11.4 billion in fighting drought

The government will be seeking Parliament’s approval in two weeks time to spend Sh11.4 billion in tackling the drought ravaging most part of the country as well as setting up county governments.

The highest amount Treasury would request to use under a supplementary budget is Sh8 billion to finance various drought alleviation initiatives.

A further Sh3.4 billion would be used to set up offices and assemblies for county government officials and representatives.

In addition, due to insecurity along the Kenya-Somalia border, Treasury permanent secretary Joseph Kinyua on Monday said that they would be seeking unspecified additional amounts of money to tackle the threat in that region.

“Although ideally a government should not have supplementary budget, it is a vital instrument for introducing important adjustments to the main budget to reflect changed circumstances,” said Mr Kinyua.

Mr Kinyua spoke after the Treasury launched a revised Integrated Financial Management and Information System (IFMIS) to replace the current system, which is still largely manual and disjointed.

The system was the government’s initiative in the fight against wasteful spending and corruption.

Currently limited

Currently, the system is limited to general ledger, purchasing and accounting payable modules, which suffer from some technical limitations with functionalities that are not sufficiently linked.

Also, there is still significant reliance on manual processes even where the system has been implemented.

Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta said that the re-engineered Integrated Financial Management and Information System would improve running of public resources and reduce fraud and corruption due to improved transparency.

“Real time processing will lead to lower transactions cost and thus readily available status reports that would enhance capacity to track budgets, payments and cash balances,” said Mr Kenyatta during the launch of the system’s strategic plan in Nairobi.

The government has formed the IFMIS department at Finance ministry to spearhead the system and ensure the country gets all benefits the system could give.

IFMIS acting director Anne Waiguru said the strategic plan has been developed to provide a structured methodology for stabilisation of the current system on one hand and to facilitate the development of a comprehensive, consolidated and integrated financial management system.

Mr Kinyua said that when the system is fully implemented it will create efficiency in government procurement making the country save as much as Sh70 billion annually.

Ms Waiguru said that the system would need to be linked with Kenya Revenue Authority so that revenue collections are regularly uploaded on the IFMIS to inform Finance ministry on the performance of revenue collection and for cash planning allocations.