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?