Cabinet’s plan for devolved units

• Proposed law calls for a third of county civil servants to come from minority tribes and sets out a three-year transitional plan

The Cabinet wants at least one third of county civil servants to be recruited from outside the larger communities to enhance national cohesion.

The percentage was arrived at during deliberations held by the Cabinet this week when the top government decision-making organ approved the County Governments Bill for transmission to Parliament.

The proposals are among wide-ranging changes that the government is preparing to undertake to effect county governments as set up in the Constitution.

County governments

The Bill includes a three-year plan on how county governments will be installed, how they will gradually inherit staff from the central government and current civic authorities or recruit their own, and how they will take up new responsibilities.

The central government will be expected to handle matters such as defence, foreign affairs, national security and the national economy while county governments will look after services such as health, education, housing and agricultural extension.

The Cabinet also proposes through the Bill that the number of wards across the country be capped at 1,450, and that every county have a minimum of 15 wards and a maximum of 25.

Cabinet further suggests that county assemblies have the power to remove a governor through a motion of no confidence. Such a motion should be approved by two-thirds of all members of the county assembly and subsequently be transmitted to the Senate for approval or rejection.

County assembly members may also be fired if 30 per cent of voters in their wards sign a petition recalling them, Cabinet proposes. It also suggests that county assemblies have the power to pass a vote of no confidence in any member of the governor’s executive committee.

The Bill will now be passed on to Parliament for approval by the constitutional deadline of February 28.

To preserve the civil service, the Cabinet proposes that all civil servants serving in capacities that will come under county governments will be deemed to be on secondment from the central government until the final deployment is done. Such civil servants will retain their salaries, pensions and other benefits, Cabinet agreed.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has considered “plausible” the proposal to cap the number of wards at 1,450, and says this will ensure that there is equity in representation in the county.

This effectively means that the number of ward representatives, the equivalent of councillors but with a likely enhanced mandate, will reduce from the current 3,465 to about 1,450.

The IEBC’s proposed boundaries report notes the commission applied a three-step process to determine the delimitation of wards.

The first step involved placing the upper limit at 1,450 as proposed by a task force while the second was the adoption of a proposal to have a maximum of five and a minimum of three wards per constituency.

The third involved applying the constitutional provision that “the number of inhabitants of a constituency or ward may be greater or lesser than the population quota by a margin of not more than 40 per cent for cities and sparsely populated areas;  and 30 per cent for the other areas.”

Population quota

The IEBC also used the population quota formula set out in the Constitution to determine the number of constituents in a ward to 26,628.