The Senate is calling for radical measures to resolve the ballooning amount of unpaid bills by county governments warning that the crisis could lead to legal battles that would paralyze operations of the devolved units.
This comes after a report by the Senate Committee on Budget and Finance revealed that unpaid bills in all the 47 counties have tripled in the last three years to reach Ksh 183 billion with fears that this would rise in the coming months.
Speaking during the ongoing County Procurement Congress in Naivasha organized by Kenya Institute of Supplies Management (KISM) and attended by 35 counties, Leader of the Majority in the Senate Aaron Cheruiyot said no single county had cleared its pending bills in the last three years despite billions being disbursed by the Treasury.
Cheruiyot warned that if the ballooning pending bills were not addressed, suppliers could stop doing business with counties leading to court-enforced attachments of county accounts.
He acknowledged that while the problem required a policy-level solution, including spending ceilings and sanctions, addressing it near an election cycle risked politicization.
“Apart from Nairobi County which owes over Ksh 90 billion in pending bills due to historical offices, all other counties have since tripled their bills in the last three years, which is crippling businesses,” said Cheruiyot.
Cheruiyot, who was addressing procurement officials, said that up to 80pct of probes undertaken by the Senate Accounts Committee touched on procurement irregularities.
“Senate has flagged the skyrocketing of project financing, loss of public funds due to abandoned projects and lack of mandatory audit committees as some of the loopholes facing counties,” he added.
KISM Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Matiba said the institute was actively pursuing strategic partnerships with the Senate and other government institutions to elevate the procurement profession’s role in socio-economic development.
Matiba said its membership has grown to approximately 28,000 professionals, a 44 percent increase which strengthened the profession’s capacity to safeguard public resources.
“Compliance audits have recorded an 80 percent turnaround rate, reflecting improved adherence to procurement standards, particularly among county governments,” he said.
On her part, the institute chairperson Jennifer Cirindi said KISM is currently reviewing the Supplies Practitioners Management Act and its general regulations, and is seeking parliamentary support for those reforms.
She added that they were lobbying for formal representation of procurement professionals in Senate and Parliamentary committees and government led boards.
