Has devolution further divided the country along tribal lines?

President Uhuru Kenyatta addressing the Fourth Annual Devolution Conference 2017 at the Kenya Wildlife Service Training Institute in Naivasha, Nakuru on March 7, 2017. 

Photo credit: File | PSCU

What you need to know:

  • Tribalism is not the exclusive preserve of the members of the Kikuyu community.
  • Devolved funds are necessary to ensure more even development across the country but there are some pitfalls we failed to consider when we sought to reform our governance institutions.
  • Corrupt and greedy governors and members of county assemblies are making a mockery of devolution.

I get quite a few letters from readers. Some of them are from unemployed youth who believe that just because I write a column, I have access to people who can give them jobs (If only they knew that I myself have had trouble getting jobs for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with my level of skills or competence).

Most of the letters are from people who strongly disagree or agree with my views; these I usually pass on to the letters’ page editor.

I normally do not respond to these letters because I am not an employment agent and because I believe that any discussion on my column belongs to the letters’ page.

When I do respond, it is usually to clarify a point or to respond to a specific query by a reader.

Sometimes I respond because the reader has said something so compelling that I cannot resist the temptation to reply.

NORMALISING CORRUPTION

This happened a couple of weeks ago when a young man wrote a letter to me in response to my recent column in which I blamed the successive governments, including the current one, for normalising corruption and tribalism in the country, which has made many Kenyans cynical about the upcoming elections.

The reader was particularly worried about whether tribalism will one day bite the hand that feeds it and whether devolution had turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing to Kenyans.

He wrote: “I have grown up to be a patriotic and honest man, courtesy of my responsible parents. Despite being educated and having faith that one day development shall occur in Kenya, especially because of devolution, I am today frustrated and am convinced that I will not wait in a queue to empower a ruthless thug to start or continue the looting ritual.

PARTY-TRIBAL AFFILIATIONS

“My future and fate as a young Kikuyu man have been or could be jeopardised and compromised by the actions of leaders from my tribe who have failed to exercise patriotism and nationalism. The current wave of political consolidations and party-tribal affiliations makes me feel scared for my young daughter. Today, when I am in a public gathering, I use my baptismal name because I fear being ostracised. Dear Rasna, do you think Kenya was ready for a devolved system of government?”

First of all, I would like to reassure this reader that tribalism is not the exclusive preserve of the members of the Kikuyu community.

I do not belong to any officially recognised tribe in Kenya, yet I have been discriminated against by people from different tribes, partly because of my race, partly because of my gender, but mostly because of short-sighted stupidity.

ETHNIC CHAUVINISM

So Kikuyus are not the only tribe capable of ethnic chauvinism.

The problem is that because of the perceived political partnership between the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin in the current government, there is a feeling (supported by some evidence) that all the plum government jobs and appointments are dominated by these two tribes.

This does not augur well for a sense of national unity.

This problem is further exacerbated by the myth that devolution will automatically take care of the inequalities between the ethnic groups, supposedly because each group or tribe got its own county.

DEVOLVED FUNDS

While devolution and the devolved funds are necessary to ensure more even development across the country, there are some pitfalls we failed to consider when we sought to reform our governance institutions.

One of these, which was once pointed out to me by Mr Wolfgang Fengler, the World Bank’s former lead economist in Kenya, is that there are just too many counties in the country.

Forty-seven administrative and political units in a country the size of the State of Texas in the United States are just not economically or politically viable.

POSITIVE CHANGES

Moreover, devolution has not ensured that devolved funds will not be stolen or mismanaged. On the contrary, we have already seen several cases of governors using county funds inappropriately.

County residents had expected a lot of positive changes in the last four years, but they have been terribly disappointed.

Corrupt and greedy governors and members of county assemblies, some of them, without the requisite skills and experience in governance and administration, are making a mockery of devolution, thereby exacerbating the very inequalities that led Kenyans to demand the introduction of devolution in the first place.

What’s worse, because counties were carved up based on tribe, tribalism has now been devolved to the county level.

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