Wake up to the reality of devolved governance

In “The Winds of War”, the best-selling war novel by Herman Wouk first published in 1971, there is a passage way inside which no student or teacher of political theory can possibly miss.

That passage reads thus: “In an odd way, the two leaders diminished each other. Roosevelt stood a full head taller, but was pathetically braced on leg frames, holding onto his son’s arm.

Churchill looked up at him with majestic good humour, much older, more assured. Yet there was a trace of deference about the Prime Minister.

“By a shade of a shade, Roosevelt looked like number one. It occurred to Pug that the real import of this conference was that it was the changing of the guard.”

This was Herman Wouk’s reality-cum-fictional impression of the first wartime meeting between American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held in a bay off Newfoundland in 1941.

When President Kibaki met the new governors in Naivasha last week, this reality-cum-fictional passage quickly came to mind.

Those governors seated in that hall immediately diminished the President just as Kibaki himself diminished them. But the extent to which the governors diminished the President was much greater than that by which the President diminished them.

Merely by travelling to Naivasha to address these new governors, the President was publicly accepting that new centres of political power now exist in all of our 47 counties. From this perspective, all that stuff he was telling them about how Kenya remains a unitary state was actually irrelevant. He knew and they knew that we now have 47 new counties and 47 new governors who are there, not at the pleasure of the President, but by the express command of the Constitution.

As we have written before in this column, devolution is the fulcrum and the core of our new Constitution. If the idea and the ideal of devolution fail, our new Constitution will effectively have failed. And no single group of individuals are now better placed to champion this noble ideal of devolved government than our 47 new governors.

In an earlier piece in this column we also wrote that those who were championing the idea of electing technocrats and former civil servants as governors did not fully understand what the core role of these governors was going to be.

In the view which we presented then, the core function of the governor was to protect his county from any undue encroachment into its operations by any forces, including the national government, and thus preserve and defend the integrity of the county.

To do this effectively, the governor had to be a person with highly developed political skills and with an extra shade of political courage.

These governors, we argued, should not be men who will jump when some top mandarin in the national government says “jump”.  They should not be men who salute and stand up when the President speaks to them over the phone. They must be men who have the stomach or the courage to stand up to the President himself or to any other national government official, if they believe that certain core interests or rights of their counties are about to be trampled upon.

Non-existent jobs

It is in this spirit that we now salute at least three of our new governors. These are Isaac Ruto of Bomet; Wycliffe Oparanya of Kakamega and William Kabogo of Kiambu. With hardly two weeks in office, these three men already appear to have internalised the central message that the primary function of any governor is to preserve, protect and defend the core interests and rights of the county against any illegal or unconstitutional encroachments by any other forces, including the national government.

We trust and pray that more and more of the other governors will begin following in their footsteps.

In this devolution struggle, the first front must be constructed around the singular, non-constitutional entity or personage now being referred to as a county commissioner. If you peruse every single page of our Constitution, you will not encounter the phrase “county commissioner”. As far as the Constitution is concerned, such people simply do not exist.

It does not matter who appointed them or what their job descriptions are purported to be. Just like, in law, you cannot sell what you don’t have or buy what is already yours, you cannot appoint people to jobs that do not exist.

Once all the new governors grasp this simple message, it will be much easier for them to know how to slowly puncture these so-called county commissioners.

Finally, a word about the Ministry of Finance. Who will the incoming administration appoint as Cabinet secretary in charge of finance? Because the finance ministry will continue to hold the national purse-strings, this matter of who will become finance secretary could become a critical factor in the struggle for effective devolved government.

If that person turns out to be a devolutionist, the struggle ahead will be much easier. If he or she turns out not to be, then we need to brace ourselves for a very tough ride ahead. That is just one more reason why we needed to elect governors who can play the political game at the highest national level.

Look out for the name of the new financial secretary. It will give you some idea of where the new administration stands along the devolution spectrum.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

[email protected]