Kenyans must reject six-piece voting in all its manifestations

This election was supposed to be about making devolution work. For the past four years, we have been sending about a fifth of our revenues to county governments that are supposed to be engines of development at the grassroots. The counties are in charge of local roads, agriculture, early childhood education, and healthcare, all very important policy areas. Therefore, we should allow our citizens – the real customers of our devolved system of government – to be the judges of the performance of their respective governors and MCAs. Six-piece voting should be rejected in all its manifestations across the country.

It is unfortunate that instead of interrogating performance in the 47 crucibles of policy experimentation we created in 2010, we are spending so much time on a national election that will be little more than an ethnic census. We ought to have spent this year’s election cycle comparing the 47 counties to one another. How can the Murang’a County governor’s successes (or failures) with dairy farming inform agricultural policies in other counties? What can we learn from the Kakamega County governor’s grassroots health initiative? How can we improve the absorption capacity of our counties in order to ensure that they do not return valuable shillings to The Treasury each fiscal year?

So far, anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that devolution is working. Some counties have done a good job of making public administration about solving our problems, especially with regard to access to public goods and services. Hopefully, over the next five years, these model counties – such as Murang’a, Kakamega, Mandera, and (to some extent) Machakos – will have a strong demonstration effect on the other 43 counties. Kenya will certainly be a much better place to be if we manage to make our public administration people-centred.

In the long-run, former county bosses ought to be the ones running for president. Instead of the current habit of electing ethnic chiefs to the highest office in the land, we ought to give the job to experienced individuals who have proven their chops by successfully running any of our 47 counties. I therefore expect strong contenders for the presidency among governors that will be term-limited in 2022. These individuals should not fall in line to our national ethnic chiefs. They should let their voices be heard, early. So, as we discuss the numbers game between NASA and Jubilee, we must also spare time to think about the impact of our style of politics on the developmental roles that we assigned to our counties. We must reject the silly idea of six-piece voting in all its manifestations. We cannot afford to waste another five years by electing public officials at the local level who are little more than sycophants of our parasitic national-level ethnic chiefs. We must vote to free our mid-level politicians from the tyranny of our ethnic politics.

- The writer is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Twitter: @kopalo