According to local dailies, the governor of Kenya’s Uasin Gishu County met with local farmers recently. Just weeks after the county’s budget was approved, the farmers grumbled that the allocation for agriculture was too small. The governor agreed and said this would be remedied in a supplementary budget.

The first question we should ask is whether the governor did initially propose more funding for the sector than what was approved by the Assembly.

Reviewing the County Assembly Budget Committee report, it appears that the Assembly did reduce the governor’s proposed budget for agriculture from Ksh575 million to Ksh509 million.

According to the report, the Committee, after consultation, felt that some of the priorities in the agriculture budget were misplaced, including the government’s planned milling plant construction at Moiben.

Up to a point, this is a pretty good story. It appears to be about a functional county budget process. The governor proposes, the Assembly consults with the public and makes amendments. The process is working.

Except that, on closer inspection, it isn’t. The governor’s budget proposal isn’t the moment for the Assembly to determine overall allocations to a sector. That is supposed to happen earlier, in March, when the County Fiscal Strategy Paper is tabled.

When the budget comes about, the Assembly’s job is to move things around within the sector but without changing the totals. If they didn’t want to see a mill at Moiben, they should have reallocated the funds for that (Ksh50 million, according to the report) to another agriculture project. 

Instead, they slashed the agriculture budget. As a result, farmers who opposed the mill, but still wanted money for agriculture, were disappointed. It isn’t clear if the farmers also complained to the Assembly (it was their fault, after all, not the governor’s).

But Ksh30 million of the Ksh50 million for the mill was left for another project in “Moiben (to decide the project),” meaning that money was left to a geographical area, not to a sector. Similarly, Ksh90 million was inserted for “ward projects” (no sector).

At a national budget event in April, Kenyan MPs complained vociferously that there was “too much” public participation in Kenya these days. But this story reminds us that the problem isn’t too much participation, but too little knowledge of why and when we are meant to participate.

The budget process in Kenya is meant to be a dialogue. Like most dialogues, it is productive when people can agree on certain things and then move on to other issues.

That is what the timelines in the law were intended to do. The point of the Kenyan system is to have different discussions at different moments. First we agree on the relative importance of sectors like agriculture in March (and the public weighs in).

Having agreed, we move on to discuss how to spend the money within the sectors in May (and again the public weighs in). This structured dialogue is intended to make it easier to prioritise by doing things in steps. 

The structure doesn’t work if the government doesn’t follow it, though. And that is what happened in Uasin Gishu. The Assembly didn’t approve sector ceilings in March, because they didn’t know they were supposed to and the governor didn’t present any. So in May, the Assembly had to revisit both the overall allocations to each sector and the priorities within each sector. 

In trying to do too much at once, the Assembly only heard part of what the public had to say. No, the public didn’t want the mill, but they probably still wanted that money to go to agriculture.

Had this been properly discussed in March, that would have been clear. Instead, the agriculture budget was cut. True, the Assembly says in its report that it preferred to spend the money for the mill on subsidising farm inputs, but the numbers in the report don’t bear that out.

Like the reports produced by many Assemblies (including the National), the Uasin Gishu report’s narrative doesn’t correspond to the allocations, undermining the budget dialogue.

The governor now says he will compensate for these failings with a supplementary budget. But a supplementary budget isn’t designed to substitute for months of debate that should inform the budget in the first place.

If the governor didn’t persuade the Assembly to accept his agricultural budget a few weeks ago, how does he propose to persuade them now? And if the Assembly has already allocated the money to geographically targeted projects it thinks are more worthwhile than sector programmes, why should it back down over a supplementary budget? A supplementary budget should be used to deal with unforeseen events, not to re-enact lost battles.

A budget dialogue has started at county level, but we are still learning how and when to talk to each other properly.

Jason Lakin is a senior programme officer and research fellow at the International Budget Partnership. E-mail: [email protected]