The Nakuru County government roads CeC Joel Maina wants the national government to stop rehabilitating county roads in Nakuru town, and instead hand the mandate over to the county government.
Speaking Friday evening when he led the cleanup exercise on Gusii road in Nakuru town, Maina said that the national government had taken their mandate through the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) and was working on most roads in Nakuru town.
Maina said that as a county government, they have no control over roads in Nakuru town as they are still under KURA.
“The state is yet to devolve the service of dealing with urban roads to the county governments and therefore as a county government, there is little we can do about such roads,” said Maina.
“The money which is supposed to be used on repairing these roads is with KURA, but we want the state to devolve this service because we are the people on the ground and we understand these roads better than the national government,” said Maina.
He further claimed that KURA was holding onto urban roads because they were afraid of releasing the money to county governments.
“Nairobi is afraid to let us work on our urban roads because they do not want to release the money which runs into billions of shillings,” he said.
At the same time, he said that money being allocated to wards for road repair and construction was too little to do any meaningful work.