Mombasa, 22nd August, 2021
Nairobi City County top leadership recently participated in a five (5) day joint working retreat with Senior managers and staff of Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS), Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) and the County Assembly budget Committee in Mombasa at a meeting that deliberated on revenue mobilization for better service delivery in the capital city, Implementation of the Finance Bill 2020/2021 and other Acts with revenue components.
Nairobi City County Acting County Secretary Dr. Jairus Musumba said that the meeting sought to synchronize all revenue mobilization efforts that included formulation of revenue enhancement strategies, identify revenue mobilization needs and ascertain whether the same have been sufficiently budgeted for in the respective sectors where the revenue streams are domiciled.
Said Dr. Musumba, “We are also here to assess KRA’s revenue collection performance for Financial Year 2020/2021 and also look at the challenges they have faced in revenue collection. At the end of this workshop we are required to report the agreed resolutions to the three principals, who have tasked us to come up with strategies of improving revenue collection in the county.”
In July 2021 the three principals; Nairobi City County Government’s Deputy Governor and Acting Governor, H.E Ann Kananu, NMS Director General, Lieutenant General, Mohammed Badi and KRA Commissioner General Mr. James Gathii Mburu held a strategic meeting where they discussed ways of increasing source of revenue for the Financial Year 2021/2022.
It is worth noting that KRA became the principle agent in revenue collection of Nairobi City in March 2020 upon an appointment by the County Executive Committee Member Finance and Economic Planning and gazettement of the same. This was to leverage on knowledge, experience and proficiency to enhance revenue collection.
In the financial year(FY) 2020/2021, KRA collected 9.8B which was a 15% growth from previous FY2019/2020 where it collected 8.5B. A target of 16.4B was set for FY 2020/2021,however this was not achieved for the reasons KRA termed as unavailability of adequate resources.
Other challenges attributed to the under performance of the revenue collection are the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of integration of Nairobi Revenue Systems ( NRS) with other revenue collection systems like integrated County Revenue Management System (ICRMS) and taxing of the county revenue by KRA among other challenges.
Some of the proposed strategies for enhancing revenue collection include; revival of the steering committee of the three principals (Nairobi City County Ag. Governor, Director General NMS, Commissioner General KRA), formation of technical working group comprising (ICT, Finance and Human Resource) departments, data migration to NRS, NRS sensitization and training, vigorous public awareness campaigns and allocation of adequate resources for revenue mobilization among other measures.
Finance and Economic advisor in the office of the Governor Mr. Silvester Kasuku called on Nairobi City County, NMS and KRA to be more proactive and adapt new systems of revenue collection going forward. He also called on the three entities to work together as a team for effective collection of the revenue.
All sectors were encouraged to identify specific funding gaps that can spur revenue growth as well as ensure that activities that fall within their core mandates and have potential to result to more revenues are well articulated and given priority in the allocation of resources.
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