Air Tickets Before Clinics: Counties Get KSh 71B More While Billions Sit IdleAir Tickets Before Clinics: Counties Get KSh 71B More While Billions Sit Idle

That is the problem with the County Governments Additional Allocations Act that President William Ruto signed at Eldoret State Lodge. The argument here is simple: Kenya should stop topping up counties that have not spent last year's development money or paid last year's suppliers, and should attach hard conditions to every shilling of this new allocation before it moves.

KSh 71.09B lands on KSh 100.2B already idle

The figures behind that argument come from the counties' own watchdog. The Controller of Budget found that counties had KSh 596.78B available in 2025/26 and spent KSh 496.58B, leaving KSh 100.2B ($771.36M) unspent.

The gap was worst where it matters most. Of KSh 233.69B ($1.80B) set aside for development, the roads, markets, water schemes and clinics residents can see, counties spent KSh 126.69B ($975.29M). That is an absorption rate of 54.21%, meaning almost half of the money meant to build things was never used.

Kisumu spent just 25.92% of its development budget. Twenty-two counties reported 189 stalled projects, on which KSh 4.21B ($32.41M) had already been paid. Nairobi alone had 57 stalled projects worth KSh 2.24B ($17.24M).

Into that picture comes a fresh KSh 71.09B, as Mwenendo reported when Ruto signed the bill on Monday. It is barely different from last year's KSh 70.67B ($544.03M). The same machine, fed the same amount, is being asked to produce a different result.

Borrowed money that waits in the bank

The detail that should worry every taxpayer is where this money comes from. Only KSh 16.46B ($126.71M) is from the national government's share of revenue. KSh 53.82B ($414.32M), roughly three shillings in every four, is loans and grants from development partners.

Grants are free. Loans are not. Kenyans repay a development loan whether or not the dispensary it was meant to equip ever opens. A county that leaves loan money sitting idle is not saving the public anything; it is running up a bill for something it has not delivered.

Our reading of the Controller's numbers is that what holds back county development is not cash. It is the ability to plan, procure, supervise and pay. More cash does not fix that. It only enlarges the pile waiting for a county that cannot spend it well.

KSh 172.53B owed to suppliers who already delivered

The second number is harsher. Counties owed KSh 172.53B ($1.33B) in trade payables at 30 June, money due to contractors and suppliers for work and goods already delivered. Nairobi City accounted for about KSh 86.90B ($668.98M), roughly half of the total.

These are not abstractions. They are debts owed to hardware dealers, borehole contractors and caterers who financed county work with their own overdrafts. A small firm left waiting on a county for years must either borrow at banks, where the average lending rate stood at 14.34% in August, or stop bidding for public work altogether.

The national government is moving, slowly, on its own arrears. Cabinet cleared KSh 23.74B ($182.76M) for 28,726 small supplier claims this month, and the business lobby promptly asked for county arrears to be paid too. Counties have not matched that effort, and the new law asks nothing of them on this front.

Worse, some counties had not even counted what they owe. In February the Controller told county leaders that only 33 of 47 counties had submitted their full schedule of pending bills. A county that has not counted its debts should not be first in line for new money.

Governors' case for unconditional transfers

The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. Governors have long blamed late disbursements from the National Treasury for their poor absorption, and they have a point: money that arrives in the last quarter of a financial year is hard to commit lawfully before the books close. Devolution was also designed to free counties from Nairobi's micromanagement, and conditions written in the capital can become a tool for punishing politically awkward governors.

Both points are real. Neither changes the conclusion. Late releases explain some of the idle KSh 100.2B, but they do not explain KSh 17B on travel, KSh 172.53B in unpaid bills, or Kisumu spending a quarter of its development budget while Kilifi managed 84.52%. Counties working under the same Treasury, with the same release calendar, delivered wildly different results. That points at county management, not only at Nairobi.

And conditions are not a new idea. The money in this Act is largely conditional already: development partners and the Treasury tie it to programmes through signed intergovernmental agreements. The question is only whether those conditions measure what residents care about.

Three conditions before a shilling moves

Responsibility for fixing this sits with three institutions, and each can act without new legislation.

First, the National Treasury and the State Department for Devolution should write two tests into every intergovernmental agreement under this Act: a verified, published schedule of the county's pending bills, and a payment plan that clears the oldest small-supplier claims first. No agreement, no conditional allocation.

Second, the Controller of Budget, Margaret Nyakang'o, should publish quarterly, county by county, how much of this specific KSh 71.09B has been released, spent and left idle, so that residents can see whether their county is absorbing donor money or sitting on it.

Third, the Senate, which passed this bill and exists to oversee counties, should summon the governors of the ten worst development spenders before any second-half release, and make each explain which stalled projects the new money will finish.

None of this punishes devolution. It protects it. Every year that development money sits idle while suppliers wait, the case for clawing money back to Nairobi grows stronger. Governors who want to keep control of the purse should be the first to demand these tests.

Kenya does not have a county funding problem. It has a county delivery problem, and on Monday it chose to answer it with another KSh 71.09B.