Policy key to ensure devolved cash serves intended purpose

In Ghana, they have a pidgin saying that goes: Monkey dey work, baboon dey chop. This saying, which basically means those in power have a tendency to live off the sweat and blood of the polloi, sums up what is exactly wrong with the state of devolution in Kenya.

Let me state from the outset, and for the umpteenth time, that devolving money and power to the villages is easily the grandest thing that ever happened in Kenya’s history. But first let’s break down the devolution thing.

Forget esoteric econometrics and the clever mumbo jumbo that the elite deploy to beffudle peasants and steal their money. The rural economy works like this: If Kienjeku goes to Gichiche shopping centre and miraculously gets Sh10,000 – yes, it takes a miracle to get this kind of money back there – he will want everyone to take him seriously.

So he buys a newspaper, even when it’s common knowledge he wouldn’t understand anything beyond the pictures and that he mostly reads the thing upside down. He then must have his old shoe - peeping toes and all - polished. Then he gets a shave, buys a quarter kilo of meat and walks to the local pub to sit ‘like other men’. By the time he staggers and shouts his way back home, he will have oiled the local economy. The barber, butcher, newspaper vendor and a few other people will have pocketed something.

This kind of trickle-down effect is common-sense, really, though economists will not explain it without quoting turgid terms. In my pedestrian understanding, I think devolution was all about ensuring public spending percolates to the periphery in terms of services and livelihoods. Or as my people would put it, it was to ensure there is “the smell of fried onions” in as many village kitchens as possible. To be sure, a lot has happened in the villages. Some governors are creating cities and investment hubs out of villages, even as others prove to be so out of their depths the villagers are planting bananas where roads once stood.

Yes, it is really something that children no longer huddle around or gawk at an ambulance, as if it is an unidentified flying object from outer space. Even the poor can now be ambulated to hospitals, which – by the way – are increasingly enjoying rare focus. Indeed, there are cases of women, youths and people with disabilities for the first time doing business with county governments. These reassuring realities notwithstanding, there is a tendency, as the Ghanaian adage would have it, by those who hold new offices to convert counties into a cash cow for the boys.

Instead of seeking cheaper solutions first, which would let the billions reach kienjeku’s level of economy, they fritter hard-earned tax money abroad. To be honest, I find the argument for “benchmarking” hopelessly hollow. How can a visit to a country that practices mechanised farming convert an MCA, who has never read anything about the said technology, into an agro-tech wizard overnight?

If MCAs want to “benchmark”, they should set aside cash for a serious library where they can pop in and read all they want. There are also videos and images on the Internet that they can gawk at without having to blow counties’ budgets abroad. It therefore comes as a pleasant piece of news that a task force led by Auditor General Edward Ouko has come up with recommendations that would make future MCAs more productive and qualified to do their jobs. For me, the issue is not even the papers, it is the attitude.

The whole idea of moving cash and power to villages was a remedial strategy to reverse a trend where a handful of tenderprenuers based in Nairobi and driving cars that gobble up more fuel than a chopper were hogging the GDP, further entrenching those in the rural areas in poverty. While we appreciate cars must be bought, county officials must travel and that cash must, of necessity, be spent on things that have no direct bearing on the rural economy, we must never lose sight of the ball.

I’m all for a formula to guide county governments on how to spend on growth vis-à-vis recurrent expenditure. Such a formula must also take into consideration a county’s level of marginalisation. That way, we will not have devolved units caught in the grip of famine setting up golf clubs. We must avoid a devolved economy where monkey dey work, baboon dey chop.