Don’t give up on quest for more equitable Kenya

The current contentious debate in the Senate on the horizontal revenue allocation formula among counties reveals the lack of political goodwill to end legal, systemic and institutionalised marginalisation.  This formula does not exist or emerge in a vacuum, but is rooted in political machinations and ideologies of those who control the dominant knowledge system that has informed economic policies responsible for sustaining regional privilege and ethnic cleavages.

The proposals on the new revenue sharing formula is a clear sign that though legally regional discrimination might have been terminated, structural, social and systematic discrimination still thrives. The dominant philosophy of public policy continues to mirror the same exclusivity and discrimination that were legally institutionalised by the Sessional Paper No 10 in April 1965 by a cabal of bureaucrats. Kenyans must be reminded that the idea of the Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) as an independent commission emerged as a response to the (traditional) skewed allocation of revenue.