NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 21– The High Court has declared the National Government Constituencies Development Fund (NG-CDF) Act 2015 unconstitutional for violating the principle of separation of powers.
The Act (2015) was amended in 2022 and 2023 in an apparent bid to beat a similar declartion of a 2013 Act that suffered a similar fate with unsucessful appeals at the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.
A three-judge bench comprising Justices Kanyi Kimondo, Mugure Thande, and Roselyne Aburili on Friday declared the Act unconstitutional citing failure by the National Assembly to consult the Senate when the Act was enacted.
The trio, sitting at Nairobi’s Milimani Law Courts, said the fund and all its projects, programmes, and activities shall cease to operate on June 30, 2026.
The judges said it will not be in the interest of the nation or justice to bring it to an abrupt closure.
Justice Thande, deviating on the question of when to end NG-CDF operation, settled on its closure at the end of the financial year.
“We are also alive to the fact that there are short, medium and long-term projects being implemented by the fund. We are now in the middle of the financial year, and funds may have been allocated for ongoing projects,” the bench said.
Seperation of powers
The bench said the value of its the programme to local communities across constituencies cannot be gainsaid.
Petitioners in the suit had contested the involvement of the Members of the National Assembly in the NG-CDF as harmful to the doctrine of separation of powers as it affected the powers of the executive as well as those of the Public Service Commission.
They also pointed to the violation of the division of functions between the national and county governments.
The petition noted that the NGCDF Act had provisions that encroached on county governments’ functions.
The programme has been in running since 2003 across the constituencies in the country.
Source: capitalfm
