-Editorial
Wajir county assembly was in the news this past week, but for all the wrong reasons. Images of an openly discordant peoples’ representative court makes for compelling television viewership not just for the value of its hilarity but also the ridiculousness of grown-ups descending to the level of a teenage brawl.
In the past, pictures of South Korean, Taiwanese or Ukrainian parliamentary deputies squaring it out have competed in ratings favourably with the defunct Nairobi City councillors, Wajir County councillors and Somalia Transitional Federal Government MPs.
However, we thought we were now above all this! Kenyans — in their collective wisdom — decided such scenes were shameful since democracy was under siege and poverty levels growing due to unacceptable historically entrenched imbalances. They re-drafted the supreme law of the land and disbursed financial resources to the grassroots. And to address the matter of developmental priorities, political governance was also devolved to county assemblies.
Many a governor, senator, nominee and county representative are doing a commendable job laying the groundwork for devolved government. They are passing requisite Bills, drawing up priority projects/programmes, some denominated in staggering sums of money.
Yes, teething problems have infected many that failed to grasp the New Kenya Order and hoped it would be a mere ride on a public gravy train. Some, like the ruckus coming out of the Wajir county assembly, show that some elected leaders are still willing to wield intellectual and electoral dishonesty that would make even the 1988 mlolongo (queue voting) look normal. Others are yet to let go of the train of impunity by clutching to the coat-tails of nepotism, watering the destructive weed of clannism, and devolving to the counties all the other negative -isms the rest of the civilised world is weaning itself from.
The matter is now under the purview of a competent court of law and would be sub judice to discuss exhaustively here. Nonetheless, all the negative energy expended on choking the infant of devolution could have been better channelled into sober, informed debate. The threshhold of meritocracy should raise rather than forever lower the bar to accommodate “one of our own”.
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