Why government should take over poorly run counties

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is the Strongman’s Strongman. And he needs to be, because Russia is vast, wild, and unruly. It spans a staggering 11 time zones and two continents: when people in Moscow are having breakfast, their countrymen 6,500 KM to the East in Vladivostok are going to bed.

Running a place this huge and potentially chaotic needs some special executive powers: the President needs to be able to step in, slap some politicians down, and impose law and order, not to mention development. And so, when some pesky regional governors became more interested in politics than in running their regions, President Putin stepped in, fired those governors, and decided to run those regions from Moscow himself. Kenya needs some of that.

pointless parroting

The pointless parroting politicians that we elected as county assembly members and governors are beginning to grate on the nerves. When we crafted this new Constitution, we thought we were devolving development and would thus have counties running where districts had merely been crawling.

The intention of wananchi was not to create a new level of political blackmail merchants — Lord knows we had those in plenty in Parliament as it was — but to ensure that government, services, and local priorities were all closer to wananchi than had been the case before.

And so we rather naively hoped that, once they were in office, our brand new county politicians would hasten to improve the lot of the people who voted them into office. How wrong we were.

worse liability

We are now in danger of not just losing the meaning of the new Constitution, but also a great deal of money as well. For the county governments have now become a worse liability than the MPs ever were. Granted, there are counties that are moving ahead with real development issues quite fast.

Some counties are seeing tarmacked roads for the first time ever, some are getting boreholes, others are having health and related services close to citizens who never had that privilege before.

But these are the exceptions, and one can count them on the fingers of one hand. The vast majority of our counties are not even poorly-run: they are not run at all. Some governors appear to have taken leave of their senses, and are now engaged in little more than political navel-gazing, waiting for the next election and squandering funds in the meantime.

A good example are these governors who are always in Nairobi. In fact, we are told some have offices in Nairobi. One wonders, when do they ever work for their counties? How about those who are always hovering around the President or his deputy, spoiling for fights with rivals? When do they work?

Others have become political-rally specialists, traversing their counties in ill-fitting clothes, holding rally after pointless political rally to fulminate at enemies, real or imagined. Yet others think they are now demigods, and have taken to issuing blood-curdling threats against this or that politician who wants to visit their counties.

The county governments are a joke, and this is what makes them so dangerous for Kenya — because they are supposed to improve on the central Government, and many are in danger of, incredibly, being worse than it ever has been, wananchi are fast losing patience.

political sloganeering

Which is why an excuse needs to be found for the central Government to run some counties directly. There are counties that are extremely vital to the well-being of the nation: some are gateways to Kenya and even the East African region in one way or the other.

Others are mega-cities with economies larger than those of neighbouring countries. Yet others are potential Rivieras whose promise is being squandered as their governors go on spending sprees to buy fast cars. The central Government needs the courage to step in, take over these counties, and run them from Nairobi.

With the explicit threat to take over any other county whose leaders are more interested in political sloganeering than in actually doing their job.