By Martin Masai

COB Slams Machakos Over Unsustainable Budget, Questions Development Priorities

The Controller of Budget has issued a damning verdict on Machakos County’s approved 2025/26 budget, warning that glaring gaps and questionable allocations could plunge the county deeper into financial crisis.

In a hard-hitting letter to Finance Executive Onesmus Muia, the COB faulted the county’s fiscal plan for failing to meet basic thresholds of prudence.

At the heart of the concerns is an admission by the county that its wage bill allocation is insufficient to cover salaries for the entire financial year.

The COB noted that while the county had listed measures to address the shortfall, no concrete or actionable plan was provided on how the deficit would be recovered. Worse still, the county failed to outline the impact of the wage bill deficit on its overall fiscal health.
The watchdog also raised alarm over skewed resource allocation.

It accused the county of merely tagging recurrent items onto the development budget under the guise of capital formation.

This, the COB observed, not only distorts the true picture of development expenditure but also undermines the principle of prioritizing transformative projects.
Other areas of concern flagged in the letter include the county’s ballooning pending bills, weak revenue projections unsupported by realistic collection strategies, and the tendency to reallocate resources without addressing structural inefficiencies.

The COB warned that such practices amount to misrepresentation and could expose the county to audit queries and further strain relations with creditors and suppliers.
In the letter, the COB did not mince words on the county’s disregard for guidelines.

The Controller of Budget reminded the Machakos administration that continued approval of budgets with glaring inconsistencies and unrealistic assumptions is unsustainable and poses a direct threat to service delivery.
The rebuke is the latest in a growing series of confrontations between oversight institutions and Governor Wavinya Ndeti’s administration, where questions of fiscal discipline, accountability, and credibility of financial reporting have become recurring themes.

The COB letter is the newest clear indicator that the management of the county is rapidly going south and frequent criticism and interventions have been greeted by inaction or false promises as shown in the letter or outright lies.

More worrying is the attitude that Governor Wavinya and her battalion in government have developed: to target anyone who questions their illegal actions, the best example being her unresolved battle to remove the Machakos County Assembly  speaker Ann Kiusya.

Tales of growing layers of graft in the county are endless, with accusers linking the governor and her son to executing contracts using Hayati Contractors.

Efforts to obtain a comment from both Mr Kuyu and Wavinya were unsuccessful, with sources indicating that the governor was on holiday in the UK.

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