Editor's Review

"I sympathise with my buddy CS for Treasury John Mbadi."

Githunguri Member of Parliament Gathoni Wamuchomba now says that she sympathises with newly appointed Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi.

In a statement on Tuesday, August 13, Wamuchomba claimed that Mbadi was handed over a struggling ministry, which she termed a 'shell without honey'.

The lawmaker, however, affirmed that she had no doubts about the capability of the new Treasury CS but had doubts about the status of his assignment.

"I sympathise with my buddy CS for Treasury John Mbadi. Listening to His predecessor, I have many doubts, not in the person of Mbadi, but on the status of the assignment. No sane man will allow you to dig his hive if there’s any honey left. The shell given to Mbadi has no honey left .We have obviously ignored the Laffer Curve principal of taxation and politicised taxation," Wamuchomba remarked.

Her remarks come after Mbadi officially took over from his predecessor, Prof. Njuguna Ndung'u, on Monday, August 12.

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Gathoni Wamuchomba.

In his handover speech, Ndung'u spoke firmly against high taxation stating that it would not raise high revenue even as the country struggled with little revenue.

"This notion that high tax rates will raise high tax revenue, the reality is the opposite. I don't want to mention who drives us there. Because high taxes cannot bring you high tax revenue, what do we need to do? We need to study how we can optimize each tax instrument," Ndung'u explained.

However, his successor affirmed that he was working on ways of reducing tax expenditure and was considering some of the proposals that were in the Finance Bill 2024.

"One area is the issue of tax expenditure which is leading to tax leakage within it. A lot of tax refund claims are fictitious, and we know it. So we must look for ways of reducing tax expenditure. There are commodities and items you may not stop subsidizing because they are basic, they impact the cost of living, but you can move them to exemption so that you do away with zero rating of commodities which end up clogging our system,” Mbadi explained.