This year's "fools' day" (April 1) came with what has been described by some quarters as a "foolish spectacle" where the Samburu Governor, Lati Lelelit, and a group of senators were involved in a scuffle at the precincts of Parliament. The senators allegedly attempted to forcibly arrest the governor for repeatedly defying Senate summons.
The Senate is seeking answers regarding Sh566 million, being public funds that were flagged as unaccounted for during the 2023/2024 financial year, including Sh390 million in irregular spending.
Financial impropriety involving governors is not new. What is new is the fact that senators have just learned that they have powers as citizens to arrest criminals and hand them over to the police for re-arresting.
Are the senators fed up with governors for misusing public funds with reckless abandon, or is it a question of retaliating against the county chiefs for suggesting that the Senate has become a toll station? One of the novel creations of the Constitution of Kenya (2010), is devolution.
The Constitution introduced 47 counties to fundamentally restructure the State from a highly centralised system to a people-centred governance approach where decisions that affect citizens directly should emanate from the grassroots.
While this shift has brought services closer to the people, recent reports from oversight bodies highlight persistent fiscal, governance and, to some extent, political challenges.
These challenges grossly undermine the capacity of the devolved units to deliver public goods to the expectations of citizens. According to Article 174 of the Constitution, the primary goal of devolution was to address long-standing issues of inequality, exclusion, and centralised power that significantly alienated ordinary people.
First, promoting democracy and accountability is achievable by ensuring that power is exercised in a transparent manner. To realize self-governance and participation, the people must be given power to make decisions that affect them directly.
Another concern for most Kenyans during the Kanu-era was that national resources were not equitably shared, with regions that had powerful political elites grabbing the lion's share of the cake. The ethnic minorities across the country often lacked proper representation at the table where decisions on the distribution of development resources were made.
Devolution has, therefore, created safeguards, ensuring the rights and interests of marginalised communities are protected. Equally important is the institution of checks and balances in governance mechanisms. This entails enhancing the separation of powers between the national and county governments. That the envisaged benefits of devolution have barely been realised more than 13 years after this governance approach was rolled out is indicative of fundamental challenges that need to be identified and mitigated as a matter of priority.
Research has shown that these challenges are of a legal, structural, political and governance nature.
The Auditor-General and Controller of Budget have consistently identified six key issues that are affecting service delivery across the counties. Pending bills, which remain a "ticking time bomb" that chokes service delivery in most of the counties, and is a threat to enterprise development.
With Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) starved of liquidity, they are naturally crowded out of business in favour of larger enterprises. Consequently, jobs are lost, leading to more poverty among rural populations.
Many counties are saddled with huge wage bills and other recurrent expenditures, leaving little resources for development, including basic infrastructure renewal.
Rural communities require motorable roads to facilitate the movement of goods and people to markets. When huge proportions of annual budgets are misdirected to recurrent expenditures, the counties definitely slow down expansion of their Gross Domestic Products (GDPs), effectively stunting income generation and job creation.
Another eyesore in the counties is low development absorption, euphemism for failure to utilise development funds, sometimes spending zero shillings on projects for several months. While counties have often blamed this failure on cumbersome procurement procedures, pundits opine that the real issue is that many pro-people projects have less opportunities for kick-backs, hence are unattractive.
The issue of own source revenue shortfalls is mostly a symptom of advertent under-disclosure to create room for malfeasance, or inefficient systems that hamper revenue mobilisation, or both.
In my view, the blame should go to Kenya's system of accountability that relies almost exclusively on expenditure audit, leaving counties to manipulate revenue collection numbers. Connected to lack of revenue audit is the perennial problem of financial impropriety.
The Auditor-General has noted missing documentation in areas involving huge expenditures, especially for legal fees, and irregular cash transfers. Delays in Exchequer releases have also been blamed for stalled projects and accumulation of interests on delayed bank loan repayments, which significantly create dents on county revenues.
Lack of clear policies on public participation and inconsistent implementation of the Public Finance Management Act, pose huge legal bottlenecks to service delivery. Also, there are still notable overlapping mandates between national and county governments, and inadequate technical capacity for complex tasks like fiscal planning and legislative drafting.
Governance remains a sticking point, with weak internal controls, poor contract administration, and "tokenistic" public participation where citizens are contacted only at the tail-end of the processes. Last but not least are the turf wars between governors and county assemblies, and the use of public resources for political entrenchment and patronage.
Make corruption expensive
How can counties be facilitated to perform better, and deliver services to citizens in fulfilment of their "social contracts?" First and foremost, is to make corruption expensive.
There are very bad precedents where governors who have been implicated in pilferage end up back in their offices after being laundered by the relevant oversight organs. To reverse this gravy train where stealing public resources is being normalised, the government should step up its punishment regime for corrupt officials.
Second, the oversight organs should ensure that counties observe fiscal discipline by strictly verifying and clearing pending bills, and adopting a zero-based budgeting approach.
Third, revenue collection should be automated to minimise leakages and enhance accountability. This should improve own-source revenue mobilisation. Fourth, enhance oversight by first, strengthening the capacity of the Offices of the Auditor-General and Controller of Budget to conduct more frequent performance-based audits, and second, ensuring that MCAs do not do business with their counties.
In conclusion, counties, if properly run, can become engines of growth and transformation. If Kenya is to realise the goal for which devolution was enacted, the governors and MCAs should never at any time drop the ball of civic consciousness.
Professor Ongore is a Public Finance and Corporate Governance Scholar based at the Technical University of Kenya. [email protected]
