Kenya’s road agencies, including the Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA), are on the spot for supervising cost overruns for at least 26 road projects and overshooting their budgets by more than Sh20 billion, leading to a spike in pending bills.
An analysis of official data from the Transport Ministry by the Business Daily has revealed that between 2007 and 2017 at least 26 infrastructure projects had cost overruns.
Though the law allows for some price variations, the fact that a significant number of the projects overshot their budgets raises questions on the quality of budgeting that has seen them fail the requirement that projects should be completed within time, budget and scope.
These cost overruns have culminated into a build-up of pending bills, currently estimated at Sh145 billion for the road projects alone. This is a quarter of the government’s total pending bills by the end of June.
In the initial designs, the total costs of these projects were estimated at Sh682.67 billion, an analysis of the data from the Transport Ministry, which has been uploaded on the Treasury’s website, shows.
However, by the time the projects were being completed, the total cost had ballooned to Sh703.19 billion, an inflation of the budget by Sh21 billion.
Inflation of the projects has been blamed on the sudden high cost of acquiring land, change in the scope of the project, and inflation when the project takes long to complete.
Save for the standard gauge railway (SGR), the country’s most expensive project, and a bridge, all the other public projects evaluated are roads. – Business Daily
