Counties
Sakaja Applies Brakes On Nairobi Parking System Rollout, Says It’ll Happen Later
Nairobi County Government has delayed the rollout of a new parking cash collection system, allowing the taxman more time to continue collecting the money. The county government says the rollout of the new system, which was initially expected to start soon, will happen later.
City Hall says it is still making final touches on its new structure that would see parking fees paid by motorists transferred to the devolved unit accounts after Governor Johnson Sakaja said he was parting ways with the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).
“Once we have a system in place for revenue collection, we shall invite the media to interrogate and interact with the new system,” the county said in a statement.
The statement contradicted the county director of parking who had said early in the week that the new system had been finalized and motorists would start using it Friday 2nd September.
The new system will see motorists use a short new code in payment of the parking fees. Currently, car owners dial *647# to pay for the parking fees, which are directly linked to the KRA account.
According to the county, some of the reasons why they are disengaging KRA is that the process was marred with a lot of secrecy, and they did not know how much was being collected.
Mr. Sakaja said the decision to strip KRA of the role was informed by the fact that the taxman was not meeting set targets previously attained by county officials when they oversaw that function.
KRA took the role of collecting tax on behalf of Nairobi County in March 2020 with officers allowed full and unlimited access to county revenue.
The new county boss is reverting most of the functions that had previously been vested to other authorities to the devolved unit. For instance, the governor has announced that he will not be renewing the tenure of the Nairobi Metropolitan when its tenure comes to an end in November.
