In the period just before the 2013 general election, the Star published a political cover story under the headline ‘Who wants to be a billionaire?’. The idea behind that article was that once devolution was fully implemented, the newly minted governors would go on a rampage of corruption, each trying to outdo the other in the conversion of public funds to their personal enrichment.
This prediction was made over 10 years ago, and I have since then often marvelled at how prescient it proved to be.
Even governors who somehow managed to maintain a reputation for having clean hands, once they were out of office, were subsequently revealed to have presided over much the same kind of illegal extractive practices as those who already had firmly established reputations for corruption.
And the sums stolen by governors and their inner circle were sums which invariably hovered around that predicted one billion shillings. The one thing that Kenya most effectively “devolved” through the 2010 constitution, was grand corruption.
There was one other prediction made at that same time: in this case it was by me in a column I wrote arguing that devolution would at last make good use of the immense human resources that Kenya had lying idle in every corner of the country.
For the established tradition going back to Independence, is that apart from the superrich who effortlessly maintain their grand lifestyles in major cities (and often have such residences in more than one city) indigenous Kenyans in general tend to “go back to the village” upon retirement.
And yet there is something totally arbitrary about the timing of such retirement. There may be some professions in which beyond a certain age the professional simply is not nimble enough to continue his work: neurosurgeons for example.
But there are plenty of others in which experience matters more than anything else, and in which a man or woman aged above 60, is actually in their prime and can be far more effective than anyone younger than themselves.
So, I predicted in that column about 10 years ago, that county governments – whether corrupt or not – would be able to draw on this vast pool of veteran talent and have exceptional managerial and technocratic capacity.
In this, I was to find that I was completely wrong.
Not that there aren’t any retired permanent secretaries, retired directors of state-owned corporations, not to mention retired accountants and bankers and other such skilled technocrats living in retirement in just about every county. What I did not foresee was the sheer intensity of the competition for county jobs.
For I made this prediction in the final years of the Kibaki administration, and this was at a time when the economy had expanded dramatically. Over the 10 years of President Mwai Kibaki’s tenure in office, government revenues increased fourfold, from roughly Sh230 billion a year in 2002 to roughly Sh900 billion by 2012.
No doubt there was youth unemployment during those golden years. But it was not as bad as it is now and has been for some time. And any retired professional living in some rural county is more likely to use his connections in trying to get a job for his son or daughter than in getting a job for himself.
Also bear it in mind that anyone who has held high office in previous years is not likely to spend hours canvassing members of the county assembly as well as the governor and deputy governor, trying to get a position for a member of their family or themselves. And yet I am informed that such intense canvassing is a prerequisite for most professional positions at the county level.
So here we have a fundamental mismatch:
The kind of people who would be most useful in establishing an efficient county government capable of delivering on all and any political promises, are not likely to stoop low enough in seeking such jobs.
While younger Kenyans with excellent qualifications, and few prospects will do just about anything to be employed by the county governments.