Wambora is a victim of legislative banditry

What you need to know:

  • What is happening in Embu County can serve as a microcosm of what our collective fortunes are staring at.
  • It is not the work of a Speaker to sponsor motions, or even to speak on behalf of those who want to sponsor motions. This can only happen when he is taking sides.

Mayhem and anarchy, Niccolo Machiavelli warned, should be used only when you are not in power.

Our Members of County Assemblies (MCAs) have either never read The Prince, or they haven’t realised that they are in power across the country.

If it weren’t so, they would save us from the unnecessary bedlam that is taking centre-stage in managing pertinent issues in our counties, especially in the area of legislation.

The legislative turmoil engulfing our counties is not a vote against devolution. Rather, it is devolution on trial. How the men and women who run our counties will handle this test will determine the future of devolution and, consequently, the development path our country takes.

What is happening in Embu County can serve as a microcosm of what our collective fortunes are staring at. The riveting drama of the impeachment and subsequent reinstatement of Governor Nyaga Wambora raises fundamental questions.

It seems the real issues were swiftly swept aside as the sideshows took the stage, exposing a raft of base proclivities inherent in our MCAs that we should have seen a long time ago.

Today, Embu residents do not even know what the entire circus was all about. It started with some loud noises in the county assembly that the local stadium was being refurbished without their involvement. The issue was not consent, as the law demands, but involvement.

The issue was fuelled by another debate that the governor wanted to weed out ghost workers, but a section of MCAs, for obvious reasons, did not want that to happen. Next was a motion to impeach the governor, which was passed in a record 45 minutes.

INFLUENTIAL SENATOR

TV crews were invited. Many MCAs said on camera that they didn’t want even to read the contents of the paper. They were just waiting to vote.

The same happened in the Senate. In fact, an influential senator was captured at a public rally in Kakamega boasting they would teach Governor Wambora a lesson — an entire week before the Wambora dossier was presented to Senate Speaker Ekwee Ethuro.

Back to the courts, nothing was discussed. The court dismissed the legislative actions of both the Embu County Assembly and the Senate on technical grounds. From the beginning, it was all about sideshows, political cabarets, pious exhibitionism and legal technicalities.

By the end of the day, no one had even bothered to inform the country what, to borrow a local saying, Governor Wambora had eaten.

And for good measure, when Mr Wambora was reinstated, it was the Speaker of the County Assembly who called the media to announce that “we are preparing another motion to impeach him”.

Now, it is not the work of a Speaker to sponsor motions, or even to speak on behalf of those who want to sponsor motions. This can only happen when he is taking sides. Something is certainly wrong in how county governments run their business.

The sideshows we have witnessed so far are scaring away investors and diverting the country’s collective energies towards vain pursuits. No sane investor wants to take his money to a county where legislators are behaving like a pack of warthogs in a gunnysack.

Mr Thatiah is a Nairobi-based publisher and biographer. ([email protected])