Governors plan parley under cloud of shrinking revenues

As the national and county governments head to a potential clash over diminishing sharable revenue and the impact on operations in the devolved regions, the Council of Governors (CoG) has unveiled a seven-member steering committee for the devolution conference scheduled for 12-15 August in Homa Bay County.
Addressing the Bunge la Mwananchi at Jeevanjee Gardens in Nairobi on Monday, National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi said counties will get Sh405 billion in the 2025/26 financial year, down from Sh418 billion this year, according to the 2025 Finance Bill.
By the end of the 2023/24 financial year, Mbadi said, the national government had not disbursed Sh30.8 billion of shareable revenue to counties and this carried over to 2024-2025.
“The share of revenue was Sh387 billion for 2024-2025. But because there was Sh30 billion which was not paid the other year, it was added to Sh387 billion, which adds up to Sh418.” Mbadi explained.
“This year, I project that there will be no carryover to the next year and that’s why it is Sh405 billion.”
Meanwhile, queries have been raised about the unwillingness of the government to complete the transfer of devolved functions to counties, with critics saying this denies counties a portion of the shareable revenue that would have been disbursed to fund the functions.
In December, the Inter-Governmental Relations Technical Committee (IGRTC) listed over 500 functions that were supposed to be transferred from the national government to counties.
Emphasising that the complete transfer of functions as required by the Constitution and related legal frameworks has not been actualised, IGRTC highlighted that duplication of functions, resource gaps in the transferred functions, and legislation that inhibits full implementation of devolution were impeding the transfer process.
But Attorney General Dorcas Oduor has since clarified that the functions are still with the national government owing to the complexity of the transfer process and lack of funds.