How Uhuru will use 2019/2020 Budget to Realization of Big 4 Agenda

President Kenyatta, it seems, is hell-bent on seeing through his Big Four Agenda which some critics have termed as “over-ambitious.”

In the Financial Year starting July 1, the Government will try to breathe life into the President’s Big Four Agenda, a development plan that some critics have deemed amorphous and over-ambitious, with some still at feasibility stage with less than four years to their due date.

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Sh410 billion kitty for development spending will include some of the projects that have been laced with controversy, including allocating Sh5 billion to the Housing Development Fund which is entangled in legal and logistical hurdles.

The Government will continue its relentless implementation of the National Integrated Management System (NIIMS) in which every Kenyan citizen will be given a unique code known as Huduma Number.

The Interior Ministry has been allocated Sh2 billion to continue implementing NIIMS, despite fears from a section of the public that the Government might use the code to create an Orwellian-like society where the State knows everything a citizen is doing or even thinking.

Despite shifting to a people-centred development budget in which most of the cash will be pumped into housing, food security, job creation, and affordable housing, and debt-financed transport and infrastructure projects will still attract the most cash.

The Big Four Agenda is expected to be executed through a Public Private Partnership, with the State contributing little cash. And China, which will neither finance Big Four Agenda nor give Kenya grants, will extend the most cash to transport.

China, the main financier of the SGR and which is reported to have withheld funds for the extension of the SGR to Kisumu, will finance the construction of the Nairobi-Naivasha leg of the track to the tune of Sh55.8 billion.

The money will help push up Cabinet Secretary James Macharia’s Transport, Infrastructure, and Housing’s coffers to a massive Sh111.7 billion, about a third of the total development budget.

But despite its deep pockets and growing influence on the country’s public finance landscape, China will not be the main financier of Kenya’s development budget in the upcoming financial calendar.

Instead, the single largest financier of the country’s development budget is the US-based World Bank which has committed to giving Sh100 billion in both loans and grants.

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The World Bank’s cash will be distributed to different State agencies, including health, devolution, education, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure.

The State Department for Housing and Urban Development will be the main beneficiary of World Bank’s cash with the global lender committing to extend loans of up to Sh16.5 billion to the government agency.

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