Kepsa takes push for uniform legislation at counties to Senate

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Vimal Shah, a director at Kepsa, said uniform laws would ease the flow of goods and services across the 47 counties.

The private sector has taken the quest for uniform county legislation to the Senate amid growing concern over the arbitrary charges being introduced at the devolved units.

Vimal Shah, a director at the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa), said uniform laws would ease the flow of goods and services across the 47 counties.

“In fact, that is one thing that we have asked the Senate to do. Let us have one type of law for all counties and standardise their accounting systems so we don’t have internal taxation in Kenya,” Mr Shah said at a meeting convened by the Senate in Nairobi on Wednesday.

He added: “We have no inter-state taxation in East Africa so why should we have inter-county charges in Kenya.”

Senate Speaker Ekwee Ethuro said the meeting between the House leadership, the private sector, academia, independent consultants, civil society and think-tanks reflected on the gains made in terms of implementation of devolution.

“We have reviewed how far we have come in the three years into devolution. We have agreed on urgent measures that need to be taken to ensure that we have proper institutions to manage devolution as we count down to the next General Election,” Mr Ethuro said.

The professionals questioned why counties propose different taxes. “Is it that we are not giving them adequate allocations as counties?” he asked.

Kepsa said the cost of doing business had been raised by regulatory charges such as fees paid to the National Environment Management Authority and the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) for licences, among others.

READ: KAM urges counties to attract business by revising tax regimes

“The constitutional thinking is that there should be no duplicate tax ever. The moment you say you are reducing the allocation to counties, what you are also doing is giving them room to think of how to raise more licences,” Kepsa said.

Mr Ethuro said the House had decided to ensure that the transition is smooth for the next Parliament to realise devolved governance.

“We have agreed that devolution is working and we want to ensure that it works better for Kenya. We want as a House to strengthen laws governing devolution through standardisation of the same,” he said.

Mr Ethuro said the House will ensure that enabling laws are enacted for the 47 county governments to act as agents of economic growth.

Businessman Chris Kirubi said counties have to compete with each other to attract investments.

“These are countries within one country and each has unique challenges and opportunities that can be exploited for growth,” he said.