The National Government of Kenya has announced plans to re-establish planning offices in counties to resume close monitoring of government projects.
State Department of Planning PS Saitoti Torome made the announcement and said that the plan has already received green light from the relevant authorities after consultation with the Public Service Commission.
“As a state department we were given approval by the Public Service Commission to re-establish the planning offices at the county level after 10 years of closure due to change of governance brought by devolution,” said Torome.
According to the PS, the new constitution 2010 brought major changes in the government which affected the operations of the department. He explained that there were many ongoing National Government projects in the counties that needed close and regular watch, therefore compelling the government to deploy staff to camp in the counties again.
Monitoring the government projects
“We used to have vibrant county offices. At that time, we used to call them district offices because the current constitution was not in place but when devolution came there was a lot of disruption. At the advent of devolution we thought that the National Government will have nothing to do with counties but then we noted that the investments in terms of projects particularly infrastructure in counties is actually even more than the county government are doing,” said PS Saitoti.
To make the plans rolling, the government started with establishing the regional offices in the eight regions namely Nairobi, Mombasa, Nyeri, Garrisa, Kisumu, Kakamega and Embu. The PS said the department has already secured a budget through Supplementary One to reestablish the offices on both regional and county levels.
As a way to monitor the government projects in all 47 counties, the PS said the president formed National Development Implementation and Communication Committee (NDICC) and the technical arm of the NDICC National Development Implementation Technical Committee (NDITC) which is made up of the Principal Secretaries and other key departments like the Central Bank of Kenya and Kenya Revenue Authority. The work of the committees is purely to review all the government projects and remove obstacles which are making them stall.
