CORD’s revenue-sharing proposal can’t work

NAIROBI: So far, counties’ capacity to deliver quality healthcare and manage simple security challenges is questionable. The counties are essentially dens of vice where many governors have become thirsty demi-gods out to clean out public coffers without a jot of shame.

Unless sweeping and stringent legal measures are taken to stop the governors from their plunder, Kenya will fold up into a sham state sooner rather than later.

Now, CORD has presented a proposal to seduce the governors and country government officials to buy into their already visible predisposition for mega pillage.

Some services such as security that naturally consume lots of money are best delivered through instruments capable of a holistic view of a country, not outfits preoccupied with serving a small part of the population. This holds true also of health and other policy-based services that play a unifying role nationally.

The Constitution did not anticipate a Majimbo whereby Kenyans would be strewn into cocoons and made subservient to county fiefdoms and tin-pot tyrants. We have a nation to protect and build. Even the USA views itself as a single unit not autonomous disparate pieces that have nothing to do with each other.
Dividing Kenya into 47 separate units is a sure recipe for destroying the ‘One Kenya, One People’ outlook and achieving CORD’s retrogressive divide and rule mindset.

Doing it by stealth, sheathing it inside a perfectly innocuous national referendum, tells all Kenyans who are not entranced by the personality cult inside CORD, especially domiciled in ODM, that something big and divisive is afoot: More about this in a minute.

Instead of emphasising the disintegration Okoa Kenya intends to achieve, we should be talking about how to perfect complementarity among the counties to make Kenya the great land it is and was destined to be. We should be talking about National Unity, the vital principle that sees all the peoples of a nation unite, for instance during war, and form a National Unity Government comprising all parties and coalitions, such as Britain during World War II.

Even in peacetime and in a federal or otherwise devolved nation, National Unity is a political construct that comprises the collective will and national spirit of groups of people that choose to live together in an indivisible national geographical area.

The spirit and will of the people are essential ingredients in any national entity. This is what CORD and Okoa Kenya refuse to see, and there are none so blind as those that will not see.

The governance of internal national unity is both a science and an art, bringing together and holding together the most diverse peoples.

The National Unity principle of post-Independence Kenya aims at expressing and nurturing the collective spirit and will of what makes us Kenyans even if we live in the Diaspora. All presidential administrations in Kenya so far have articulated the National Unity idea, for better and for worse.
At its heart are the democratic principles of governance in action for all.
Governance in action must reflect the will of the people, all the people, all the time.

This is where CORD and its Okoa Kenya referendum fall flat on its face.

On the whole, Okoa Kenya wants to choke the national government and by doing so kill democracy and run Kenya as a fragmented and dysfunctional bunch of entities governed via fiefdoms and rusty tin gods.

Taking away 45 per cent of national government revenues to the counties while the devolved administrations are still taking their first baby steps is a proposition made in hell.

At the end of the day Okoa Kenya rescues nothing, it is not a life or nation saver. It is a formula for disruption and long-term conflict. It is the surest enemy of development and of the people — all people.