City Hall misses building permits revenue target by whopping Sh1.6bn – Nairobi News

The Nairobi County government missed its annual revenue target from building permits by a staggering Sh1.6 billion, a report has shown.

Nairobi City County Revenue and Expenditure report as at June 30, 2020 recorded a paltry Sh456.7 million from the revenue stream.

This represented a measly 22 percent of the Sh2.1 billion annual revenue target set by the county government.

The financial year’s collection is way below half of what was collected by the county government in the previous financial year.

DISMAL PERFORMANCE

In the 2018/2019 financial year, City Hall collected Sh990 million from building permits. This was against a target of Sh1.5 billion.

The collection was even much better in the financial year ending June 30, 2018 when the county government posted Sh1.1 billion.

“Nairobi City County government collected Sh456.7 million from building permits. This is part of the Sh8.5 billion total revenue realised by the county government in the financial year ended June 30, 2020,” the report by Nairobi County Finance and Economic Planning Executive Allan Igambi tabled before the Nairobi County Assembly on Tuesday reads in part.

The dismal performance from one of the top five revenue earners for City Hall stems from disruption in the sector occasioned by mass suspension of officials in the Planning department and firing of the entire technical committee charged with the approval process by Governor Mike Sonko in August last year.

DEVELOPMENT PLANS

The result was a piling of the applications leading to different institutions in the built industry raising concerns about the delays in processing of the development plans.

This led to a backlog of more than 4,000 of development applications as the county government continued to lose money as a result.

The officials and the committees made a return in January this year only for the two committees to again be disbanded in May by the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) Director General Mohammed Badi.

The move saw the county government’s pre-technical committee and the Nairobi City County Urban Planning Technical Committee done away with.

The two committees were responsible for consideration and approval of development application. It took until July for a new approval committee to be put in place.

However, Major General Badi announced in July that NMS had cleared the 4,400 development applications backlog and are currently processing 100 percent of the development applications submitted for approval.