Last week I pleaded with protagonists on the proposed referenda to spare the country rigours of a politically and economically expensive referendum by dialoguing pre-referenda.
As I wait, without bated breath, for the dialogue I believe it is important to discuss the Okoa proposals.
There has generally been little discussion on substantive contents of the Okoa Bill except for occasional perfunctory, largely uninformed analysis tending to focus more on the sensational.
Generally speaking, the Bill contains 26 major propositions on a wide range of issues from issuance of ID cards to the county government involvement in security. I propose to speak to two of its major proposals; one relating to elections and the other on revenue division.
On elections, the Bill makes fairly good proposals, including those relating to management of the voter registration process to make to more it more facilitative. My only concern is these are matters that could easily have been resolved through amendments to the Elections Act. The Bill then makes several startling proposals. Firstly it requires IEBC to register 80 per cent of all eligible voters in every constituency. In a country where voting is not compulsory, how does Okoa propose IEBC will accomplish this “tyranny of numbers” bursting miracle?
The Bill then proposes that only voters who are identified electronically should vote. Firstly this is a matter for legislation not the Constitution. Secondly, technology routinely fails, and not always for sinister reasons. If for any reason this occurred, numerous people would be denied the right to vote for no fault of their own.
The other outlandish proposal relates to the IEBC membership, which CORD proposes should be by way of nomination by political parties. I have no idea how a Commission can be said to be independent when it is comprised representatives of the parties to the elections! Okoa must be reminded that elections are not about political parties but about Kenyans. The Constitution has allowed Parliament the leeway to design a process that produces an independent commission. If the current law does not produce an independent commission, CORD should propose an alternative process but not one that takes us to a dysfunctional “stakeholder” electoral body.
On revenue division, the Bill makes one major proposition. It proposes to increase revenue allocation to Counties to 45 per cent of revenue collected by the national government. Because counties have generally been underfunded, this is the most popular proposal in the Bill.
Unfortunately it is also the most reckless. The Bill fails to locate revenue division in the broader conversation about functions and responsibilities of each level of government. It must be remembered that the national government is not an illegitimate appendage to county governments. It is the unifying level of government that the Constitution has given huge responsibilities. If Okoa were to carry the day, the proposed 45 per cent minimum funding would leave the national government unable to carry out its mandates which the people of Kenya expect it to. Just consider if the proposal had been followed this year, the allocation to counties would have been about 400 billion shillings, leaving the national government with about 500 billion. This year alone, the national government paid about 360 billion shillings in debt repayment and another 150 billion or so for education. Consequently by Okoa’s figures, the national government would have had to borrow or tax Kenyans more to pay for other functions including funding infrastructure, Parliament, the Judiciary, the security services and a host of other functions that the Constitution gives to the national government.
Failure to approach revenue division in a manner that looks at government as a whole may excite the activists, but it could well sound the death knell for devolution if the proposals lead to a constitutional and financial crisis. Granted there is need for counties to get more funding.
The Constitution has given Parliament, not the Executive, the role of determining the money due to counties. Parliamentarians should be the last people to come pretending to people they care for devolution by making impossible propositions when they have consistently failed to carry out their constitutional duty in this matter.
We need a little more seriousness from our leadership on such critical national issues.
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