It now seems like Kiambu County Governor Ferdinand Waititu finally learnt his lesson after his Sermon at Senate’s Public Accounts and Investments committee to answer questions concerning the Auditor General’s (AG) queries on his county’s expenditures in the FY2017/18.
The Governor has since gone back to the drawing board and come up with a fresh budget for the good people of Kiambu.
A revised Kiambu County 2018/19 Supplementary Budget was on Monday presented to the public who gave their submissions ahead of its presentation to the county Assembly today.
This follows the decision by the Milimani Commercial Court to nullify the original budget earlier this month following a successful legal redress by some MCAs who said no public participation was held before it was passed.
On Monday, the public accused the county government of rushing the revision of the budget, saying nothing much had changed from the original estimates.
They said there was no way they would have understood the content of the more than 300-pages document which was distributed to them minutes before the oral submissions were made.
However, interim Finance committee chairman Daniel Ngugi said the Sh16,914,352,387 budget had addressed all the contentious issues raised in court.
An MCA, who spoke on grounds of anonymity, said the recurrent expenditure of the county government was questionable.
“We are told that the recurrent expenditures is high because workers have had their salaries increased and that more workers have been employed. This is a lie because the Executive is looking for funds to cover up for the Sh700 million lost through the infamous Kaa Sober programme,” the source claimed.
During the court battle, ward representatives alleged that more than Sh1.5 billion had been misappropriated. The court stopped the implementation of the controversial supplementary appropriation budget and advised the county executive to revise it.