National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has linked the significant backlog of pending bills in the country to inefficiencies in the budgeting processes.
Highlighting this as a core issue contributing to the current bills, which exceed Ksh600 billion, he mentioned that the government is exploring a more structured budgeting approach at both levels of government to prevent future unpaid bills.
“To deal with pending bills, we first need to deal with budget. It’s not about prompt payment. We have to deal with pending bills at the budgeting stage. We have to be realistic in our budgets. Counties must stop over-projecting own-source revenue. National government must stop over-projecting revenue collection,” he stated during a stakeholder meeting chaired by Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi.
Mbadi revealed that the total pending bills currently stand at approximately Ksh663 billion.
“From preliminary analysis, the bills may come down to Ksh.450 billion after verification. But we carried forward from last financial year Ksh151 billion, so we are talking about not less than Ksh600 billion, and much of it is under the road sector,” he explained.
As part of remedial measures, the National Treasury CS confirmed he would propose to the Cabinet the development of a system akin to a stimulus to assist in settling these bills over time.
