someone who's not too impressed by Machakos County
Who’s afraid of Machakos County? Not I, given their peculiar budgeting habitsC&P: "One question we ask of county budgets is whether they have budgeted enough to maintain key services like health. According to our estimates, the recurrent budget for health in 2012/13 in Machakos was Ksh1.1 billion.
In 2013/14, the county budgeted Ksh183 million for its recurrent health budget. This may be because it put all health worker salaries under the executive (poor practice, but relatively common in 2013/14).
In this year’s proposed budget, the figure for recurrent health rocketed up to Ksh1.3 billion, potentially enough to cover ongoing expenditure. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of health salaries (over Ksh1 billion) are now in “general administration and planning.”
Is that because Machakos has decided to fire health workers and replace them with health administrators? I doubt it. It rather reflects incompetence in programme budgeting: you don’t put all of your health workers under administration, just like you don’t put them all under “executive services.”
Once again, this is the same mistake many counties have made in 2014/15, one that substantially undermines the transparency and credibility of the budget.
What should we take from all of this? I have singled out Machakos because Machakos has singled itself out. The evidence collected here doesn’t suggest to me that Machakos should be viewed in a particularly bad light. It suggests rather that Machakos is pretty typical of the county experience so far.
Miraculous? No. Menacing? Not really. Just decidedly mediocre."
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. - Muhammad Ali🐝