Kalonzo Warns Against Treasury Plan to Place County Funds Under Nairobi's Control as Constitution Turns 16

H.E. Dr. Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Tenth Vice President of the Republic of Kenya and Party Leader of the Wiper Patriotic Front, today marked the sixteenth anniversary of the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010 with a warning against the National Treasury's proposal to bring all forty-seven counties into a single national account controlled from Nairobi. Dr. Musyoka stood at Uhuru Park as Vice President on 27th August 2010 when President Mwai Kibaki promulgated the Constitution, with Prime Minister Raila Odinga beside him. Following Kibaki's death in April 2022 and Odinga's in October last year, he is the only surviving principal of that day.

"We have a first-class Constitution and second-class compliance," he said. "The document itself is not our problem. Our problem is the distance between the text we celebrate every August and the conduct we tolerate for the other eleven months."

On devolution, Dr. Musyoka said counties are routinely made to wait four or five months for funds that Article 219 requires to be transferred without undue delay and without deduction, forcing county governments to borrow from commercial banks, at interest, money already due to them. Citing the Controller of Budget, he said counties owed Sh163.74 billion in pending bills as at December 2025, up from Sh128.94 billion four years earlier, with Nairobi County alone owing suppliers Sh81.79 billion. Public hospitals in the counties are waiting on Sh26.87 billion in Social Health Authority claims. He said a Treasury that has failed for four years to release the fifteen per cent equitable share on schedule cannot be trusted to hold a county's entire revenue and determine, week by week, what a governor may spend. He noted that Article 225 already provides a lawful route to stop funds where there is serious breach, subject to Parliament's approval and a

public reason. Dr. Musyoka restated the Wiper Patriotic Front position that the equitable share under

Article 203 should rise from fifteen to thirty-five per cent, and committed that under his

administration the county disbursement schedule would be gazetted and published monthly, with interest on late transfers accruing against the national government rather than the county, and no function transferred without the funding that supports it. He was equally direct with county leadership, telling governors that Nairobi is not their only problem and that a clean audit trail is the price of their office rather than a courtesy to their counties. Turning to elections, Dr. Musyoka traced the Constitution directly to the collapse of the 2007 tally, in which more than eleven hundred Kenyans died and over six hundred thousand were displaced. He said his questions about the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission are a matter of national security rather than positioning for 2027, and asked whether the voter register is open to audit, whether election technology is being procured transparently and can be tested before polling day, and whether the boundaries review remains within constitutional timelines.

"A stolen or mismanaged election does not remain a legal problem," he said. "It

becomes a security problem, then a humanitarian one, and then a scar that

outlives the people who caused it. We must not be taken there again."

The PL closed by ruling out support for any amendment that shrinks devolution, weakens the independent commissions, tames the Judiciary, adjusts term limits or engineers offices to settle elite bargains, noting that Articles 255 to 257 place the power of amendment with the people rather than the powerful.