Victor Bwire is the Director, Media Training and Development at the Media Council of Kenya/HANDOUT
The current funding and implementation of devolution must be rethought urgently. The current model is wasteful and frustrating and has stalled devolution. We have politicized devolution to the level that nothing good might come out of it for Kenyans.
While ministries and public agencies get their capitation monthly and in time to enable paying of services, salaries and related, staff and services at the counties come in as late as three months.
When such happens, statutory deductions, loans and other personal deductions are delayed, service providers are not paid, and counties are stuck with endless pending bills.
County staff who have gone for a
few months without pay are very demoralized, many have deserted duties, and
services at the counties are below standards.
The discrimination staff in the counties are going through is unfathomable. Even as the county leadership continues grappling with these challenges, MCAs have not given the executive, county staff and even service providers, breathing space with huge demands for money.
The behavior, character and operations of some of the MCA’s, is nothing better than councilors, and many Governors remain more like chairmen of the defunct county councils.
Perennial challenges facing devolution include delayed disbursement by the national government to the counties, delayed and demotivated staff, stalled/abandoned projects due to delayed funds for development projects, capacity issues at the counties especially in project implementation and accounting that sees friction with the Office of the Controller of Budget-—that leads to delays in disbursements, national government holding onto huge percentages of funds for devolved functions.
Funds to the counties are released in dosages with monthly liquidations, which never happens with the ministries and public agencies and counties are always blamed for not using their development votes.
Increasingly, fully devolved functions are now being done by ministries. to use funds or support misusing public funds.
Additionally, at the county level, the executive arms holds onto funds meant for independent bodies such at the County Service Boards, County assemblies still get their allocations through the executive instead of being functionally and financially independent, own generated revenues especially from Health cannot be utilize at the source as they have to be remitted to central account, and many times disbursed to other uses, huge wage bills related to ghost workers and a poor working culture.
Procurements in most of the counties is hawked and no value for money, hot air payments and pending bills, dysfunctional revenue generation units and lack of focus or competition with national government on project ideas. Special project accounts, especially for development partners, are held in secrecy and misused badly because of poor supervision and non-disclosure by project staff.
There are several lessons that we have picked from the many attempts at decentralization since independence, through majimbo, which granted significant recognition and responsibility to the regions.
The system granted power to the Local Authorities to collect taxes and the responsibility for the maintenance of schools, health facilities and minor roads. This key in the current devolution arrangements.
Through “Sessional paper No. 10 of 1965 on African socialism and its application in planning” the government established the principle of state direction of development process and decentralization of planning based on local inputs as a means of improving socio-economic wellbeing of the rural community.
The Sessional Paper No. 4 of 1975 on ‘Economic Prospects and Policies’ laid emphasis on Government’s commitment to rural development’. In furtherance of this thinking, since late 1970s and early 1980s, the 6 Regional Development Authorities (RDAs) established were given a common mandate to plan and coordinate the implementation of regional development activities.
The District Focus for Rural Development Strategy (DFRDS) that made the district the epicentre of all development interventions emphasized economic and social development via exploitation of local resources.
The Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) was implemented in 2000 in tandem with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) followed by the Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation (2003- 2007).
We have enough lessons on the issue, and doing otherwise and creating the current challenges at the counties is the surest way to kill devolution.
The suffering at the county is so inhuman-—remember, even after going through these frustrations, like delayed disbursements with the attendant problems of delayed remittance of statutory deductions, institutions such as KRA, SHA and banks have penalties for the counties and individual staff respectively.
This is a call to media and other accountability players that a lot more needs to be done to improve on highlighting the plight of counties and need address them urgently. These are stories of interest that media could focus on and ask questions to those charged with overseeing the devolution process.
Victor Bwire is the Director, Media Training and Development at the Media Council of Kenya
