Supplementary Budget Plans to Cut off Development Budget by 70 Billion Shillings

The National Treasury is planning to table a supplementary budget for the first half of this year with the unexpected bound to happen.

Unlike other supplementary budgets where money was added to the ministries, this time round things are going to change as money is going to be called back from the ministries.

This comes after it emerged that there has been a slow rollout of projects in the ministries as well as the changing of the targets of the spending of the cash.

According to the records available on the spending of the ministries, by the end of the month of December, ministries were found to have not utilized a total of 139.2 billion shillings that had been allocated to them for developments.

According to the proposed supplementary budget, a total of 70 billion shillings is set to be cut off from the development budget.

There is a looming conflict between the treasury and the counties after it emerged that the treasury is also planning to slash off some of the funds that are allocated to the counties for developments.

The move to cut off some 70 billion from the developmental budget, economic analysts warn is going to hurt the economy and greatly deter future economic prospects. The supplementary budget also will see a recurrent expenditure being reduced by 23 billion shillings.

During this week, the Kenya Revenue Authority released a report where it failed to reach its half year target for revenue collection by more than 46 billion shillings. This failure to hit the target came after the first one where KRA failed to hit the target last year by 28 billion shillings.

The government was blamed last year for massive domestic as well as abroad borrowing but this time the treasury appears to have reduced its domestic borrowing by 53.3 billion shillings. The treasury now plans to borrow 168.2 billion shillings in the local market this being a reduction from the 221.5 billion shillings target that had been set by the treasury in the budget last June.

Article by Juma Fred.