Governors should get off campaign mode and get their hands on the job

Beyond these questions, this year's election has brought to an end the era of the pioneer governors. By deed of law, every county now has at least a taste of new leadership at the helm. The work of laying the foundation is over. In between the 10 years, the cumulative returns from the Controller of Budget indicate that at least Sh2.603 trillion have been approved from the Exchequer in favour of the 47 counties by March 2022. This includes Equitable share allocated under Article 202 of the Constitution, Conditional grants from the national government and own source revenues.

The impact of these devolved funds to the individual county economies is still out for debate given the short period of data available from County Gross Product analyses. While there have been evidence of some positive changes in a few counties, especially for the historically marginalized ones, majority have either maintained the status quo or declined.

Poverty alleviation

However, of critical interest in this article is on the county responsibilities in poverty alleviation in local communities. This responsibility is implied under three key elements of the objects of devolution provided for under Article 174 of the Constitution: Rights of communities to manage their own affairs and development; need to promote social and economic development; and ensure equitable sharing of national and local resources. Despite the billions devolved to each of the 47 counties in the past 10 years, I have consistently demonstrated here that there is negligible visible impact at the county own source revenue statistics. The national household income demographics do not show any significant shifts on income re-distribution from the urban areas to the rural communities either. If anything, several data sources from the national statistician and international development partners point to continued disparities among the urban, peri-urban and the rural areas.

For instance, as at the date of the August 9 elections, drought and famine emergency response data estimates project at least 4 million people scattered across over ten counties face severe starvation. The media has documented the ravages of the drought especially among the Northern Frontier counties. While the National Drought Management Authority together with the Directorate of Social protection has ongoing emergency response programmes in these counties, it is not clear what interventions the counties are doing on themselves.

More importantly, we have had devolution for a decade now yet it is still unclear if any of the counties has established any long term plans to resolve this perennial problem. Having been in the devolution space right from the onset, I do understand the challenges many of these counties experience. It is a fact that we are not going to have an overnight solution to the problem of drought and famine frequent in most regions of the country. But it is also equally true that county leaderships cannot continue to lay blame on historical marginalization not to demonstrate actionable interventions towards a sustainable solution. The framers of our devolved constitutional order did not envision a scenario where county governments will perpetually be depended on sharable revenues to implement devolved functions. On the contrary, the architecture of our decentralised system envisioned a tendency toward a semi-autonomous, internal revenue-sufficient form of local governments. This is because the structure of our devolved units heavily mirrors that of the US and South Africa.

Leadership obligations

It is for this reason that the obligations of county leaders in the fulfilment of the goals of devolution must be given microscopic attention. As the new county bosses take up the reins of power, the citizenry must make it clear to them that it cannot be business as usual. While no one can tell which county will head to which direction on matters development over the next five years at this point, the new bosses are already showing footprints of the same old order. A casual walkover across different mainstream and social media platforms seem to suggest many are still in the campaign mode. As the embers of the 'terroristic' assault reigned on opponents by paid bloggers in the past election recede in our memories, many new county bosses seem not to have moved on from that. Their bloggers are still giving a blow-by-blow account of their daily movements contrary to established time honored bureaucratic systems that define order in governments.

For instance, to what profit does it pay to fire outgoing county executives on social media? It is a fact that any incoming administration comes in with its own executive team and senior staff. But leadership decorum demands that the incoming and outing administration establish a smooth transition framework with clear handover timelines and procedures. A change of government cannot also be used to victimise public officers that did not support the winning team.

Like any other citizen, public officers have rights to exercise their power of the ballot and freedoms. That said, the new county bosses must ready themselves for the unique challenges that lay ahead. Three things are peculiar in this transition: One, the ongoing high cost of living and the famine ravaging communities will not just be a problem of the national government. Faced with hard economic times, it will be difficult to explain to starving households why they should wait for relief from the national government and development partners when they have voted for a government closer to them. Two, the debt burden and revenue constraint is going to rare its ugly face in the flow of cash flows allocated to the counties.

In the past five years, the National Treasury has struggled to remit funds to the counties in good time for them to smoothly run their affairs. This situation is not about to reverse at least up to the medium term. It will require 'Solomonic wisdom' both at the national level and in the incoming county administrations to juggle between existing obligations, expenditures and pressure to implement their campaign manifestos with the limited available resources.

Finally, the new administrators will have to content with a much informed citizenry unlike their predecessors. As at the 2013 elections, many folks did not understand the power, responsibilities and resources vested on county governors. This has changed a lot over the past ten years and may actually help explain the voter behavior to go back to some they rejected in 2017!