No Cash Transaction at City Hall From Next Week Governor Sakaja Declares
Traders and businesses seeking services in Nairobi will from next week pay for services and licenses through digital platforms as the county moves to tame losses and corruption associated with cash transactions.
The move comes afterthe Council of Governors (COG) meeting in Naivasha that resolved to work with the office of Controller of Budget (COB) to automate all budgetary issues by December this year in order to enhance transparency and accountability.
Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja in his first address to the assembly said that the county will launch a new revamped system of revenue administration in the next week.
“We all know that a myriad of reasons have led to revenue leakages in the past including non-digitization of revenue streams, manual collection (and stealing) of cash as well as multiple platforms for payment of rates and other fees,” said Sakaja.
Nairobi becomes the fourth county to automate revenue collection after Meru, Homabay and Murang’a.
The county is pushing the boundaries on revenue collection following revelation by the Commission on Revenue Allocation that the county is collecting KSh9 billion a year in Own Source Revenue when against a potential of Sh67 billion.
“No money will be received or demanded in cash. We must reign in all our revenue and on this I shall not compromise,” added Sakaja.
We will have to address our debt problem,
Low revenue collection and increasing expenditure has seen pending bills at City Hall hit Sh99 billion, from the County Government and Sh16 billion from the outgoing Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
“We shall be presenting our fiscal and debt management strategy to this assembly early next year. We shall further devolve services to the proposed five boroughs and the 17 sub-counties. Automation of county government services will be aggressively pushed to raise revenue.”
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