A poor fisherman, who lived on the fish he caught, had bad luck one day and caught nothing but a very small fry.
The fisherman was about to put it in his basket when the little fish said,“Please spare me, Mr Fisherman! I am so small it is not worthwhile to carry me home. When I am bigger, I shall make you a much better meal.”
But the fisherman quickly put the fish into his basket. “How foolish I should be,” he said, “to throw you back. However small you may be, you are better than nothing at all.”
The moral of this story is that a small gain is worth more than a large promise.
ODM has mooted the idea, amongst many others, that devolution should be elevated by adding a layer above the current structure through the creation of regional governments. This is with the promise that Kenyans will get more fruits from devolution this way.
Let me state that the party has made some very good recommendations to the Building Bridges team, such as drastically slashing the size of the bicameral Parliament from 416 to 208 lawmakers.
It also wants the Senate empowered as the Upper House to enhance devolution as well as abolishing the nominated seats in both Houses. ODM proposes that devolved governments should be allocated 45 per cent of national revenue, of which 13.5 per cent would go to regional governments and 26.5 per cent to counties.
However, there are two changes that stood out for me, one being a single term seven-year presidency, and the other being inclusion of a third overall tier, thus elevating devolution.
In my opinion, the presidency should be shorter, preferably two four-year terms maximum just like in the US, Egypt, Ghana and Nigeria, among others. This ensures that future presidents do not become complacent, and can be removed for under-performance sooner.
But going back to the second proposal that I have identified, all Kenyans are in agreement that devolution is working. Most counties have been able to decentralise services and bring development closer to Wanjiku.
In my opinion, it’s still too early to make changes to devolution. I’ve seen the positive effects first hand, working as a CEC in Kiambu and there is absolutely no need to have another tier to serve the same residents.
This regional tier will bring confusion, tension, and probably even cause supremacy fights between the county and regional governments. Already, we have situations where governors cannot see eye to eye with either MPs or MCAs in their counties.
We should therefore work on enhancing the current system instead of creating another centre of power in the name of regional government. In fact, we should be enhancing devolution in making it cheaper to run, not putting in place structures that end up costing the taxpayer more.
If anything, we should be discussing bringing governance closer to the people at the ward level. In addition, devolution should enhance the distribution of development funds up to the ward level to ensure that the key function of devolution works.
We need to have a system where, while looking at the devolved functions, Parliament allocates money to both the national government and counties in an equitable manner.
For instance, the national government should get less of the health budget funds since this is a devolved function. The same should happen for agriculture, water and roads as these functions are primarily for the counties to deliver.
In the roadmap to enhancing devolution, it would also be important that we get it right on the relationship between governors and county assemblies to deal with the ongoing wrangles.
In a nutshell, so far, the current devolution structure, which is not even 10 years old, is working and what we need to do is to enhance it and not to build another layer on top of it.
Political and communications consultant
@MachelWaikenda