The government is establishing Regional Committees to ensure quality service delivery and proper coordination of its development programs.
This is a strategic move seeking to forge a close working relationship between two levels of government: National and County following the 2010 constitutional Reforms that devolved certain services to the 47 counties.
Nyanza Regional Commissioner, Zipora Mworoa told the National Government Co-ordination Secretariat (NGCS) that if well implemented it will promote government visibility and highlight key development programs that have otherwise been swept under the carpet.
Mworoa said this was in line with the 2023/2024 Budget which presented to Kenyans a five-point Bottom Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) plan that President William Ruto seeks to use to turn around the country’s fortune and deliver inclusive growth.
BETA is the slogan that informed the President’s campaign and rallied behind the hustlers who played a key role in his election to guide this country’s Economic development over the next 5 years.
She called for more collaboration between the national and county governments especially on Health and Agriculture as well as Road construction programs areas where she observed that there was so much duplication and overlap.
“Under such confusion is where unscrupulous people take the advantage to promote corruption activities but with the onset of the committees such deals would be nipped in the bud through enhanced and timely information sharing with the relevant authorities”, she added.
Mworoa singled out Lake Victoria where fisher folk have had numerous confrontations with security agencies from the neighboring countries leading to their arrests and the infiltration of contraband goods into our country as areas of major concern.
She said that sometimes there are no proper guidelines on how best to handle such sensitive, cross-border issues with our neighbouring countries, pointing out that quite often this has largely been attributed to existing bureaucracy between us and our neighbors.
The RC appealed to the NGCS team to expand their wings and address issues of corruption which cuts across all sectors of the economy. This will ensure that the public gets quality service delivery and paint the government in good light.
The NGCS team, led by Musa Machooka, Secretary of Government Programme and Project Delivery, Office of the Prime Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs, said they were coordinating closely with National Government Administration Officers (NGAO).
Machooka emphasized that they were facilitating enhanced Policy Coherence to avoid creating confusion while improving information sharing among the respective State Departments and other Government Agencies for seamless service delivery.
“We have created a dashboard where we can track and inform the leadership on Inter-Governmental Relations, Risk Management as well as Public Engagements between the citizens and government officers”, he explained.
He singled out the Visa Free Program which is just one among the numerous government undertakings that have been made possible by way of Real-time relay of information.
The team has also been mandated to facilitate discussion on economic and development issues, knowledge sharing, leadership matrix, and Labour Migration which promote job opportunities for the youth outside the country.
Nyanza Regional Director of NGCS, Silvance Osele called for capacity building for all government departmental heads with a focus on every program, policy, and project. In Nyanza, he said, the uptake of fertilizers was too low due to misinformation that it burnt crops like maize.
Osele dismissed such misinformation as dangerous thus the need for government to adopt strategic communication preferably using social media and FM Radio Stations in Nyanza, Western, Eastern, Coast, North Eastern, Rift Valley, Central, and Nairobi.
By Joseph Ouma
