Let's focus on next ten years of devolution

Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua and CoG Chairperson Anne Waiguru are shown robot of an aircraft by Mr Drone Yaron at their exhibition stand during the closure of the Devolution Conference in Uasin Gishu County on Aug 18, 2023. [Peter Ochieng, Standard]

At this year's devolution conference in Eldoret, attendees celebrated ten years of devolved government. As I have argued repeatedly, devolution is the crown jewel of our 2010 Constitution.

Its promise of participatory self-government mashinani is the definition of democracy. It promises to bring public goods and services where Kenyans work and live, and in so doing allow us to live to our fullest potential as a society.

It is also true that devolution has so far not lived up to its fullest potential. The fact that the conference is in Uasin Gishu County, whose former government stands accused of misappropriating nearly Sh1 billion from country residents, sums up the biggest challenge facing devolution: poor leadership.

There is only so much we can do writing a visionary constitution and enacting visionary laws. At the end of the day, we also need the personnel to actualise our constitutional dreams. And on this score, we have so far failed.

The past is gone, so we must focus on the future. When looking ahead at the next ten years of devolution, two things come to mind that ought to be the focus of governments in the devolved units.

First, county governments should endeavour to maximise the use of their most important resource: their people.

Nothing betrays lazy leadership than the constant whining that the 47 counties are too small to be economically viable.

There are jurisdictions around the world that run impressive economies on the basis of far fewer people than our smallest county. Our problem is not that our counties are demographically infeasible, it is that we have parasitic leaders who view devolution as a means of stealing devolved funds, rather than engineer economic growth in their respective units.

Second, all county governments should have explicit and aggressive urbanisation strategies. Our future is urban, which means we need to think about jobs (including in agriculture), housing, transportation, schooling, hospitals and other amenities in that mindset.

Through urbanisation, we have the potential to seed several different subnational economic ecosystems that reinforce each other at the national level.

All Kenyans of goodwill should avoid the temptation to succumb to the cynicism of our parasitic leaders and their limited ambitions.

We should remain vigilant and insist that devolution must work. It is our best shot at collectively improving our material condition as well as consolidating our democracy.

The writer is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University