In 2011, Kenya made a bold bet. The Urban Areas and Cities Act (UACA) was meant to do what the county system did for the national government: Take power from the centre and give it to where people actually live, the towns.
But walk through any municipality in this country; Kehancha, Engineer, Awendo, Migori, Homa Bay, Kisii, Kitale, Kerugoya, Naivasha- you will see the same story, A beautiful signboard written ‘Engineer Municipality’ outside a rented building. Inside, a Municipal Manager with no staff, no vehicles, no budget, not even drinking water for the manager and his guests. And a Municipal Board that meets to “advise” while all the real decisions are made at the County Headquarters.
The law is clear. The reality is different. Governors have refused to transfer functions to municipalities, and in doing so, they have stifled the very growth devolution was meant to create.
Under Section 20 of the Urban Areas and Cities Act as amended in 2019, once a town is granted municipal status by the governor through a charter, the county government shall transfer functions related to urban management to the municipality.
These include physical planning and development control, solid waste management, maintenance of municipal roads, storm water and street lighting, management of markets, bus parks, and public amenities, enforcement of municipal by-laws and management of municipal revenue collected within its boundaries, among others,
The law also requires the county to employ staff and allocate a budget. A municipality is not a department. It is a semi-autonomous corporate body with its own board, manager, and bank account.
On paper, it is the model of Singapore and Kigali, professional urban management insulated from politics. On the ground, governors have turned it into something else, an empty shell.
Why then do governors refuse to delegate functions and budgets to legal entities created by the law to deliver or bring services proximate to the people?
To understand the refusal, you have to follow the money and the economics of fiscal control. A municipality is where the county makes its Own Source Revenue (OSR). In Migori County, Kehancha and Migori Municipality alone account for over 70 per cent of market fees, matatu park fees, building plan approvals, parking fees and advertisement fees. In Nakuru, Naivasha and Nakuru Town municipalities generate over 60 per cent of county OSR.
Transferring the function means transferring the collection and management of that money to a board that has financial autonomy. Most governors do not want that. They want the revenue collected and banked directly at the county headquarters where it can be appropriated centrally, often to fund operations far away from the town that generated it. No plough back to source.
Roads, drainage, street lights, garbage trucks, market sheds, these are big tenders. If functions are transferred, the municipal board becomes the procuring entity. The power to decide which contractor tarmacs which road or who supplies garbage trucks shifts from the county executive to the municipal manager under board oversight.
For a political class that relies on procurement patronage, that is a loss too big to accept. It’s a figment of imagination.
A functional municipality creates an alternative centre of power. A board chair who is visible, commissioning roads and cleaning the town, is a potential political rival to the governor or area MP. By keeping the board powerless, governors ensure that all development is branded as “Governor’s project” even if it is in the heart of town.
The municipality is therefore left chartered but not empowered. It exists in law, but not in budget. Left in such a state, the municipalities cannot plan; the towns sprawl uncontrollably.
Without a development control function, a municipal board cannot stop unplanned construction. In most towns within municipalities, buildings are coming up on road reserves and riparian land; storey buildings are approved without parking while architects from county headquarters are having a field day collecting illegal fees from unsuspecting clients.
Why? Because physical planning staff remain at county headquarters, several kilometres away, where they approve plans without ever visiting the site. In some cases, they become agents of Chief Officers in sleaze and skullduggery.
Some municipalities that should have their own planner, surveyor, and enforcement officers, have none or share one who serves the entire county. The result is towns that are growing rapidly but without form, congested, flood-prone, and unattractive to investors.
Ask a trader in any municipal market who collects his garbage. He will tell you: “Sometimes the county truck comes, sometimes it doesn’t.” That is because solid waste management was never fully transferred. The municipality is responsible for cleaning, but it has no trucks, no drivers and sometimes no dumpsite. Despite yearly municipal budgeting that details the purchase of such utility vehicles, the county treasury slash or removes them with flimsy claims of budget duplication.
The county may have the trucks but says cleaning is a municipal function. Sometimes, claims of no fuel emerge, leading to accumulation of mounds of garbage in towns. In the meantime, the helpless municipal board bears the beating.
This gap is where towns die. Garbage, blocked drainage, non-functional streetlights, broken markets, all because two entities are fighting over who should do the work, while none does it.
Devolution’s second decade will not be judged by how many county headquarters built fancy offices. It will be judged by whether a mama mboga in Kehancha market can walk on a paved road, sell under a clean shade, and go home under a street light. It should be the clarion call anywhere a municipality exists.
That will only happen when governors stop clutching to functions and let municipalities do the work they were created to do. Election is around the corner, and wise citizens should evaluate their governors along such precarities.
