Where did Mt Kenya MPs get county GDP data from?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

04 November 2018

A group of parliamentarians from the Mount Kenya region held a meeting recently and demanded that their counties should get more resources (read, money) from the national treasury because they generate “60% of Kenya’s GDP”.

It is not clear how they arrived at that figure but any casual observer will suspect that it is wrong. In previous utterances on this subject, I have heard Nairobi politicians claiming that the capital city accounts for two thirds of national GDP.

Now when we add the two thirds (about 67%) from Nairobi to the 60% from Mount Kenya, we get 127%. Obviously, these numbers are not adding up – literary!

It reminds me of the often-quoted proportions of Christians and Muslims in Kenya – 80% and 30% respectively. The total comes to 110% which is impossible!

Even though the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) publishes poverty reports annually, these do not carry information about the GDP of the counties. Thus, it is difficult to know where the Mt Kenya parliamentarians got their data from. I suspect they just took a quick guess to make a political statement.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that leaders in many regions around the country have bee clamouring for additional resource allocation from the national government. The argument being that too much tax revenue is being retained in Nairobi and dished out unfairly to politically favoured regions.

My reaction to these demands is that tax revenue is collected from individuals and businesses operating in the counties. Therefore, instead of waiting for the tax money to be sent to Nairobi and then returned to the grassroots, the County Governments can simply collect it directly.

How? Tax is calculated as a percentage of income. Income is the difference between business revenue and expenses. Thus, the county governments can easily hike up their levies and fees. This will reduce the profit made by businesses and hence the tax payable to national government goes down!

Unfortunately, such a move wouldn’t be politically expedient. So, no politician would even suggest it. 

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 The examination season is here with us again. As usual, media reports have focussed on the few isolated lapses in the organisation. But organising exams is a monumental logistical task. Let me try and paint the correct picture.

There were about one million pupils taking the KCPE exam this year and another 660,000 sitting for the KCSE. The KCPE was done in 27,000 centres around the country and 10,000 for the KCSE.

65,000 invigilators were engaged to run the KCPE exam overseen by 27,000 supervisors. In the KCSE, the numbers are 37,000 and 10,000 respectively.

Each KCPE candidate sat for seven papers and every KCSE one about 15. In total, there are about 7 million KCPE papers to be marked (2 million of them manually) and about 10 million in the KCSE exams (all to be marked manually).

If it turns out that 1,000 papers have mistakes, would that be reason to bash the exam managers? Work out the proportions and decide for yourself.