So far most of the proposed constitutional changes miss the mark

It is increasingly clear that a referendum is inevitable ahead of the 2022 elections. The remaining question is: what features of the Constitution should we amend before 2022? At the moment, the leading camp behind the referendum push - led by Raila Odinga - seem to have wrong answers to this question. The proposals include reducing the number of counties, increasing the number of executive positions, and switching to a parliamentary system of government. All these proposals lack merit.

The claim that Kenya has too many counties is myopic. Our population will more than double in the next 50 years. A Kenya with 80 million people will definitely need a greater density of governance than we have now. In fact, even under current conditions we are still woefully under-governed. We need city, municipal, town and rural governments. These entities need not replicate the structures of the counties -- they can have less than 10 elected members each and specific specialised departments such as refuse collection, water and sanitation, health inspectorate, agricultural extensions.

The idea of super-counties -- the number 14 keeps being thrown around -- is one that has been bypassed by events. Merging counties will create the same problems of equitable distribution of development that we have at the national level. Those pushing for this idea betray their lack of imagination with regard to strategies of national economic and social transformation. We should be thinking of how to spur economic growth in the counties in order to increase their revenue collection. Instead, some of us seem to be stuck in a world in which county governments forever rely on national government transfers for their budgets. The scale argument in favor of the 14 super-counties assumes that the 47 counties will never be able to raise their own revenue. This the wrong approach to the main problem facing devolution in Kenya: the lack of capacityIndeed, the very complaints from some quarters suggest that they had not planned for how devolution was going to play out. For example, their surprise that Turkana, having been neglected for over 50 years by the national government, is not suddenly a paragon of economic development and governance capacity is evidence that they have not thought through their proposals. Instead of whining about Turkana’s delay in being a mecca for growth over the last five years, they should have planned back in 2010 on means of ensuring that county governments work to lay the ground work for economic development and local revenue generation.

On the proposal to switch to a parliamentary system, I doubt that this will be a panacea to our branch of toxic politics of ethnic exclusion. Well-functioning polities are not mere products of constitutions. They run on histories of conducive political cultures and established norms governing elite consensus. If we switch to a parliamentary system without developing the requisite political culture, we are likely to end up with governments that rise on Sunday and fall on the following Monday. Furthermore, current global trends seem to point at the presidentialisation of parliamentary systems – with power concentrated in the hands of prime ministers. One need only look at Botswana and South Africa, two parliamentary systems that essentially function as presidential systems, to see what might happen here should we make the switch. Kenyans should only entertain constitutional changes that strengthen devolution and intensity of participatory government.

- The writer is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Twitter: @kopalo