Every so often, I will see a newspaper headline that reminds me of what is a widely held but hopelessly misguided belief here in Kenya.
And this is the view that when it comes to the national budget, high levels of “recurrent expenses” are an unjustified burden on the Kenyan taxpayer. While “development expenditure” is a good thing, and that more public funds should be allocated to it.
Let me illustrate my point with an example from the first few decades after Independence.
Back then, it was often pointed out that Kenya spent roughly half of its annual budget on just two priorities: education and health. And of these two priorities, education took the lion's share of the money, at roughly 30 per cent, while health services took up about 15 per cent.
Allowing for some degree of fluctuation then, these two priorities accounted for about 50 per cent of the national budget.
Thus, other national priorities, such as security services, public works, agriculture, our foreign diplomatic missions, the Office of the President, and so on, had to share the remaining roughly 50 per cent.
Additionally, of the money set aside for education and health, a relatively small percentage was for development expenditure within the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Education. Most of it – by far – in any given year, went on recurrent expenses.
And this was not considered something to be ashamed of. On the contrary, the reason many of us who were still very young back then would remember these statistics, is that they were frequently quoted by our top leaders as proof that we had our priorities right.
Put simply, most of the money given to the Ministry of Health went to paying doctors, nurses and other staff in public hospitals, clinics and rural health centres.
While the money given to the Ministry of Education was for paying teachers, in both public primary and secondary schools.
This is not to say that Kenyan schools and health facilities were adequately provided with teachers or nurses. Rather, it is that the bulk of the national budget was clearly targeted at addressing priorities which could be argued to have been a national consensus.
By “national consensus” I mean that – then as now – most of us would agree that easily preventable or treatable diseases should not be a death sentence for the poor, and public health facilities must be made available within easy reach of the urban poor in city slums, and the rural poor in remote villages.
And – then as now – I would insist that there is a national consensus that even the children of the very poorest Kenyans should have the opportunity of rising beyond their childhood poverty. And that attending local public schools, which provide more or less free education, is the only viable path out of such poverty.
These two, if nothing else, are things we all agree on.
But what I am pointing to here is that both require a massive investment in human resources. Both are only effective if there are plenty of skilled staff employed by the government.
So, if the bulk of the health or education budget goes on recurrent expenses, that is actually a good thing.
The real problem then, is not whether or not we have our national priorities right. Rather, it is that – in typical Kenyan fashion – corruption will always creep in when it comes to the implementation stage of actualising these noble values.
When it comes to recurrent expenditure, there have been regular reports of “ghost workers” on the official payrolls, especially when it comes to county governments. This is a practice by which people who are not in any way employed by the government – and who may not even exist at all – have a regular salary paid into their bank accounts, every end of the month.
And as for development funding, very often when the leadership of a county declares that they have prioritised the construction of a brand-new top-level hospital, more than likely you will find two tragic outcomes will in due course be revealed.
In one case, the extremely ambitious new hospital will be only half finished at the end of that leadership’s term in office, even though all the money allocated to this project has been spent.
Or you will find that the construction of the new hospital has indeed been completed. But it has plenty of very expensive and supposedly “cutting edge” equipment, which nobody knows how to operate; and so all that shiny new medical equipment has to be kept in storage.
Wycliffe Muga is a columnist
