You're out of touch with reality, Governor Abdullahi scoffs at COB

Council of Governors vice chair Ahmed Abdullahi on Tuesday hit out at the Controller of Budget blaming her of being out of touch with reality.

The Wajir governor was responding to COB's remarks on Monday that counties have been wasteful on expenditure in the last six months saying that very little was going to development.

In her report, Margaret Nyakang'o stated that governors violated the law that requires a minimum of 30 per cent of the county governments' budgets to be allocated for development projects.

In Wajir, the COB said said its recurrent expenditure is Sh3,718,115,817  while development is Sh448,526,202 which translates to 8.3 per cent spend on development.

But speaking in Wajir town, Governor Abdullahi said that the COB was being used to paint the counties in bad light.

“She is really out of touch with the reality, completely out of touch with the reality. I think she should leave her air conditioned office to come and see what is here and what we are going through,” Abdullahi said.

“So she should be serious and stop politicking. If there are people who are trying to use her to paint the counties badly, give the counties a bad name, call a dog by bad names so that you can kill it, it will not work, not in today's Kenya."

“Counties exist by virtue of the Constitution that Kenyans chose for themselves and they will not cease to operate because some bureaucrat is making wild allegations and giving half truths of things that she doesn’t even bother to understand."

Abdullahi further took issue with the slow pace at which it takes for monies to be released to counties, something he said has had a negative impact on the development programmes in counties.

“We are operating under very difficult circumstance which the COB cannot know if she is just sitting in her Nairobi office. As we speak, we are yet to access our money for November. Money is released from Treasury three months late, again it takes another three weeks before the Controller can allow you to access it,” he said.

The county boss said the report won't distract him and his administration from performing and saving lives, noting that as of February 28, his administration was tracking water to more than 177 sites across 57,00 square kilometers.

Abdullahi, who has over time and again lamented over the huge amount of recurrent bills that he inherited from the previous regime, further scoffed at the COB over her failure to take charge over the ballooning expenditure.

“I wish that discipline  was exercised in the last five years so that I don’t have to inherit Sh5.5 billion pending bills. It would be nice if we would be told where the COB was at that time,” he said.

The governor said that the expectation of people on the ground was so much and the prevailing drought has made a bad situation worse.

The row between governors and Nyakang'o has intensified as county chiefs accuse her of acting outside her mandate for rejecting their requests to withdraw Sh3.2 billion.

The development comes after Nyakang'o said her office denied counties the monies between July last year and January 2023 due to breaches of fiscal laws.