FACT-CHECKED: Did Nairobi receive KSh 3,600 per capita from county funds for the financial year 2020/2021?
How true is the claim that Nairobi County, home of the Kenyan capital city, received an allocation of KSh 3,600 per person from county funds for financial year 2020/2021?
In a tweet posted on October 26, a Twitter user by the name of “Hon. Robert Murathe’’ claims that Nairobi County received KSh 3,600 per person from the county revenue allocations for the financial year 2020/2021.
According to the tweet, Nairobi received an allocation of KSh 15.9 billion in 2020/2021, which translates to KSh 3,600 per person.
The tweet also says that if the allocation is increased to 35 percent as proposed in the Building Bridges Initiative report, the capital city will receive KSh 24 billion, which will translate to KSh 5,506 per capita.
This brings up the question: Is it true that Nairobi County received an allocation of KSh 3,600 per person from county funds?
PesaCheck has examined the claim that Nairobi county received an allocation of KSh 3,600 per person from county funds and finds that it is TRUE, based on the following reasons.
Kenya’s Commission on Revenue Allocation is mandated to recommend to the National Assembly the basis of equitable sharing of revenues raised nationally. It decides how much revenue will be divided between the national and county governments, and how much each county receives. Currently, 84.5 percent of total revenue is allocated to the national government while 15 per cent is allocated to the counties. The remaining 0.5 percent goes to the Equalization Fund that is designed to provide basic services to marginalised areas.
The constitution gives the senate the power to create the regulatory framework for most issues affecting counties, including determination of the level of funding allocated to each county.
In this regard, there are three ways in which the Senate determines what funds will be allocated to counties. The first involves a process that the Senate conducts jointly with the National Assembly during the Division of Revenue process through which the amount of money to be allocated to the national government and the county governments is determined. The second stage is exclusive to the Senate and is achieved every year under provisions of The County Allocation of Revenue Act,2013. The Act gives the Senate powers to determine the allocation that will go to each county in a financial year from the total allocation to the counties.
Currently, counties share revenue based on five parameters — population (45 per cent), equal share (25 percent), poverty ranking (20 percent), land area (eight per cent) and fiscal responsibility (two per cent).
However, the Commission on Revenue Allocation recently proposed a new formula, which links allocation to government function and is also designed to reward efficiency and local revenue generation. It assigns health (17 percent), agriculture (10 percent), urbanisation levels (five percent), road network (four percent), land area (eight percent), poverty ( 14 per cent), fiscal effort (two percent), prudent use of public resources (two percent), all other services (18 percent) and equal share ( 20 percent).
The new formula has been passed and was adopted by the Senate in September 2020. It will remain in effect for three years from FY 2021/2022 and will see counties receive KSh 370 billion. The expanded budget includes President Uhuru Kenyatta’s pledge of an additional KSh 53.5 billion over and above the KSh 316.5 billion earlier proposed by the CRA.
Under this new arrangement, Nairobi City County will receive KSh 19.2 billion in the next financial year.
Nairobi City, with an estimated population of 3,138,369 as per the 2009 census report, received an allocation of KSh 5,033 per capita in 2018/2019 and KSh 5,557 per capita in 2019/2020 respectively as indicated in the table below.
In 2020/2021, Nairobi received an allocation of KSh 15.92 billion, the same amount it received in 2019/2020.
Calculating the per capita allocation for Nairobi City using the current total revenue allocation and using the 2019 census population figures for the county (4,397,073) gives a per capita allocation of KSh 3,620.
This, therefore, brings us to the conclusion that Nairobi City County received a per capita allocation of KSh3,620, making the claim TRUE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker James Okong’o and edited by PesaCheck deputy editor Rose Lukalo. It was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
