ODM leader Raila Odinga on Thursday morning joined Senators at Parliament Buildings for a crucial breakfast meeting on the Fourth Basis Revenue Sharing Formula, hosted by the Senate Finance and Budget Committee.
The engagement, held inside the Senate Chamber, was convened to brief and rally lawmakers around the committee’s revised proposals on how national revenue will be distributed among Kenya’s 47 counties between the 2025/26 and 2029/30 financial years.
Odinga, a vocal proponent of equitable resource distribution, arrived shortly after 9:30 a.m., accompanied by a small team of advisors and political allies.
The meeting comes amid growing tension over the revenue-sharing model developed by the Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA), which has sparked fierce debate among senators, governors, and policy experts.
Under the CRA’s proposal, revenue distribution would be weighted across several parameters: population (42%), equal share (22%), poverty index (14%), land area (9%), and income distance (13%). A stabilization clause was also included to ensure no county receives less than its 2024/25 allocation.
However, the Senate Finance and Budget Committee, chaired by Mandera Senator Ali Roba, has rejected the CRA’s formula, citing concerns that 31 counties would lose funding under the proposed model.
Instead, the committee has recommended setting a fixed baseline of Sh387.42 billion—the current allocation—as the minimum guaranteed amount for counties moving forward. It further proposed adjusting key weights, including increasing the basic share to 35% and population to 45%, while completely scrapping the income distance parameter.
The committee also criticized the CRA’s stabilization mechanism as arbitrary and called for a more scientific method to manage funding deviations.
