Boundary review all about numbers

Does Kenya need more constituencies, or is the proposal to increase their number by 80 just another of our lawmakers’ ploys to rob the taxpayer?

That’s the question in the minds of many, especially after some politicians and lobby groups objected to the Parliamentary Select Committee’s proposal to increase the number of parliamentary units from the current 210 to 290.

For a number of those who attended the Naivasha meetings that passed the proposal, the idea is timely in ensuring equitable distribution of resources, and their proposals have received the thumbs up from a cross-section of professionals.

But there is more than meets the eye in the political lobbying that has become the hallmark of the country’s reform agenda.

If the current 210 constituencies — many of them babies of political gerrymandering — are redrawn, some will have to “disappear” in an attempt to balance the population and area covered by a constituency.

Mathematically speaking, the average population per constituency, going by the latest figures of 40 million Kenyans, is 190,000. The average area for a constituency is 2,771 square kilometres.

Equality of vote

The point of redrawing boundaries is to enhance representation, provide for the equality of vote, and build cohesion among communities.

Now, if all constituencies were to cover 2,771 square kilometres and have at least 190,000 people — the ideal parameters — then the government will have a lot in its hands in terms of developing all areas equally.

But, going by past experience and the ‘curse’ of the arid lands, the prospect of ‘equal development’ is remote indeed.

The government favours ‘equitable’ development, meaning every shilling put into a project should be able to generate a substantial return, and this, the technocrats say, is not easily realised in marginalised areas.

Thus the need to create constituencies that do not vary so much from each other as is the case now. Yet, even where the variance in population is humongous, it ought to be cancelled out by the size of the constituency.

The Naivasha team settled for a 40 per cent variance — both area and population — among constituencies.

Mr Chachu Ganya, the North Horr MP, has a whole 38,000 square kilometres and about 44,000 people in his constituency. North Horr, in terms of area, is a combination of Central, Nyanza and Nairobi provinces put together.

Embakasi MP Ferdinand Waititu has the most populous constituency, with 434,000 people (1999 census figures), and an area of 208 square kilometres.

The population of Embakasi is almost equal to the combined figures of four constituencies in Western Kenya — Mumias, Matungu, Butere and Khwisero.

That means if we looked at it through a population lens, the erstwhile larger Butere-Mumias District, with a population density of about 500 people per square kilometre, should be merged into one and represented by one MP.

Yet, the four constituencies are nothing in size compared to Turkana North and North Horr, each with an area above 35,000 square kilometres.

Margaret Wanjiru’s Starehe has the highest number of people per square kilometre (22,164) in the country. Compare that with Laisamis, which has only two people per square kilometre, and the elephantine task that awaits the boundary review team hits home.

The short apolitical answer is to merge the “small” constituencies and have a certain average population. But that would be political suicide, especially for parties whose strongholds are not in very densely populated areas.

The obvious winners of such an arrangement would be Central, Kisii Nyanza and Nairobi.

Also, it would be a fallacy to base the creation of constituencies on average area alone, as this could lead to the splitting of North Horr into 22 constituencies each with 2,000 people.

But politics is a game of numbers, and that’s why Mr Andrew Ligale and his Interim Independent Boundaries Review Commission (IIBRC) are burning the midnight oil trying to find the right formula for this.

Prof Francis Aduol, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, has crafted a workable formula to sort out the boundary mess. He calls it the 90:10 Rule of Population Against Area.

Although the ratio is the average for the whole country, it effectively comes down to the conclusion that the voting patterns in the country will achieve equality of vote — the one-man-one-vote principle — by up to 90 per cent.

For the sparsely populated areas, they’ll achieve the one-kilometre-one vote principle, although the percentage as to the equality of vote will be whittled down.

What they lose for being few, they gain by having a large area.

IIBRC’s Mwenda Makathimo, a surveyor, backs the formula as one that “passes the empirical test”.

However, the civil society is up in arms against the proposal, saying 290 constituencies are too many and will be unsustainable. While it was not the mandate of the PSC to develop the criteria, it says it had a duty to set the minimum and maximum number of constituencies and entrench it in the Constitution.

Bearing in mind that President Kibaki has created 254 districts and vowed to make every constituency a district, it seems the government is too willing to create more constituencies, and that has a section of the electorate jittery.

For the IIBRC, the job just got a whole lot harder, and they will have to craft some clever ways to sweet-talk the voter into accepting additional men and women in Parliament.

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