The budget. Sort of.

Let's try something especially boring this time round.

The national budget is a law. I hope you knew that, because if you didn't we are about to enter horridly uncharted territory. Anyway, the national budget (and the county ones too) is a, as the lazy newspaper reporters tend to call it, piece of legislation called the Finance Bill. When the Finance Bill becomes the Finance Act, and the President signs it into law (i.e., assents to it), then things like taxes and the like can be collected by the national government.

The Finance Act, actually, is not the budget. We call it the budget. But it isn't. In the olden days, those days when we did not have a new Constitution, there were two Bills that were sent to Parliament at the same time. One was the Finance Bill - which usually amended boring laws like the Income Tax Act, the Value Added Tax Act, the Customs and Excise Duty Tax Act, the Banking Act and the Insurance Act. The other was the Appropriations Bill. This one was the Budget. It still is. It says how much each ministry, department or agency will spend in the coming year and on what.

Today the constitutional ground is vastly different from the one of five years ago. The Appropriations Bill (which is also sometimes called "Budget Estimates") is no longer a secret document unleashed on unsuspecting parliamentarians on Budget Day. Back then the Minister of Finance was the only one who had a hand on the budget; these days even the ordinary mwananchi - I am using "ordinary" very, very elastically - has a hand in the budget. The budget requires the active participation of the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury (he is the lead author of the Appropriations Bill), the Controller of Budget (she decides how much each ministry, department or agency can efficiently and effectively spend), the Auditor-General (he decides whether previous expenditures were efficient or effective), the Parliamentary Budget Office (which tries to square the interests of parliamentarians with those of the national Executive) and the Departmental Committee on Finance, Planning and Trade of the National Assembly which either gives the Appropriations Bill the thumbs up or the kiss of death.

All these characters are guided by a paper prepared by the National Treasury called the Budget Policy Statement which is submitted to Parliament on the day after Valentine's Day. That paper is usually a summary of the Appropriations Bill and the current proposals for the Finance Bill. It is this paper that is debated and haggled over in parliament and published for the ordinary mwananchi to weigh in.

You are all familiar with the Tyranny of Numbers by now. What few know is that the hypothesis only works if the Minority Party (that's what the Constitution calls the opposition)  is too small (not the case here) or it is split (sometimes it is - look at what Chris Wamalwa did to the EACC) or its members spends a large amount of their time twiddling their thumbs, off on crazy junkets to Crete or imagining their futures as governors or something else. Anyway, the Tyranny of Numbers is not the iron rule when the Finance Bill or the Appropriations Bill come for debate, because by that time every parliamentarian and his rather irate uncle knows how much money has been allocated for that borehole in Kimilili and which ministry is responsible for the shortfall.

You know our parliamentarians are good at their parliamentary jobs when they somehow manage to ensure that an extra 20 billion is found for the NYS and a mysterious 15 billion is spent by the Ministry of Agriculture for irrigation when there is a Ministry of Water and Irrigation.

The budget is a law. Because of the Constitution you have a chance to participate in its making. I can't guarantee you will be heard. But you have a chance to participate. Perhaps you should.