Uasin Gishu Deputy Governor Eng. John Barorot has called upon the newly appointed County Executive Committee Members (CECMs) to scale up efforts to help improve budget absorption by 10 per cent in the next year, noting that it was one of the key parameters that would be used to measure their performance.
The Deputy Governor who spoke during the swearing-in ceremony of the CECs, pointed out that budget absorption had been a serious challenge cutting across all the counties as most of them exhibited low absorption rates
“In the last year of Governor Jackson Mandago, the budget absorption overall for Uasin Gishu was 62 per cent which means we were not able to use 38 per cent of the budget,” said Barorot.
He noted that the county administration is going to put in place performance contracting yearly for CECs where they will be required to fulfil the set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (SMART) objectives key among them being budget absorption.
“In governance, we are measured in terms of service we deliver to the people, when it comes to measuring budget absorption, we will be focusing mainly on the development budget as the operational budget can be spent in various ways,” he noted.
“We will give you a target, if it was 62 per cent as we have already checked with the governor on every department’s absorption rate, we are going to add 10 per cent for the first year, if your department had an absorption rate of 60 per cent we will give you a target of 70 per cent of budget absorption for development budget,” explained Barorot.
Barorot noted that budget absorption cuts across departments and requires a lot of teamwork to be achieved. Additionally, he said that the county administration is set to introduce Own Revenue Collection in which a target of Sh 1.4 billion has been set to be collected from its own source, which implied that each CEC would have a share of a departmental target for revenue collection from its own source.
“We want to inculcate the culture of performance in the county, within the next seven days we are going to sign the Performance contracts and evaluate the uptake of the performance culture within the human resources that we have,” said Barorot.
Source: Kenya News Agency