Is there an anti-devolution conspiracy afoot?

By Dominic Odipo

Kenya: To Senator Kipchumba Murkomen, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Devolved Government, this was part of a “grand conspiracy to cripple the Senate and have it wound up.”

To Governor Isaac Ruto, the chairman of the Council of Governors, the matter was much more straightforward. ‘The only thing I thank the President for is that he has opened our eyes. Those of us who had gone to slumber can now wake up. Devolution is finished.”

But to President Kenyatta, it was done “strictly within the law in pursuance of the national interest and with a view to safeguarding integrity and timeliness of the budgetary process.”

The matter in contention was President Kenyatta’s decision to sign the contentious Division of Revenue Bill last week in the form in which it had been presented to him by the National Assembly without further reference to the Senate.

If this new Act is now implemented fully in its current form, county governments will lose a total of about Sh48 billion which the Senate had allocated to them. But that, as everybody including the President himself knows, in not the real issue here.

The real issue here is which of our two houses of Parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate, should have the last say on these matters relating to allocation of funds to county governments.

But, even beyond that, is the critical question of whether the President’s decision to sign the Bill was his clearest signal so far that the Jubilee Government plans to scuttle the whole idea of devolved government by first castrating and then eventually abolishing the Senate, whose principal function is to safeguard and champion interests of county governments.

As traditional British movie scriptwriters would gleefully put it, the game is now in play. The President has already put a bomb in the water and is now waiting to see where the dead fish will land.

And that, exactly, is the point. On whose side of the emerging political divide are the dead fish likely to land?

By appending his signature onto that Bill, the new President has effectively taken head-on, the entire Senate, Council of Governors and all County Assembly Speakers. The message that these senators, governors and county Speakers might soon begin receiving on their phones is this:

“This government does not believe in the basic principle of devolved government. It wants to abolish not only the Senate but all the county governments as well. And it is working through the National Assembly, the provincial administration and the courts to ensure that devolved government is first wrecked, financially crippled and then formally abolished.”

Both Murkomen and Ruto whom we have quoted above, are members of the Jubilee Coalition, which rose to power only two months ago after a very contentious general election. Both are members of United Republican Party, that wing of the Jubilee Coalition which is led by William Ruto who is now the Deputy President.

No doubt both of them remember very well that Ruto, the new Deputy President, is the man who openly led the opposition to the new Constitution which we promulgated in August, 2010 and whose core and fulcrum was devolved government.

But now in their new positions, both Senator Murkomen and Governor Ruto are now taking up arms against the President and, by extension, their party leader for apparently threatening  to castrate the Senate and, eventually, to abolish devolution altogether.

Falcons vs falconer

For them, as for so many millions of Kenyans out there, it is no longer a matter of petty party political interests. It is the national interest itself, which is now at stake. As W.B. Yeats might have put it, the falcons are no longer hearing the falconer.

It is, as they say, early days yet but the signature that Kenyatta appended onto the Revenue Bill last week could return to haunt the rest of his presidency and the Jubilee Coalition vision, which, to its supporters, was looking so bright only the other week.

That signature may have defined, in indelible ink, the one issue which was always going to be the most difficult for the Jubilee Government to deal with: Effective devolved government.

The irony is that it is the President himself who has thrown the bomb into the water.

Amoebic though political power often tends to be, it can also be very notoriously finite. If you remove or devolve it from Point A, it generally flows immediately to Point B or to somewhere else. If, as in our current circumstances, you devolve it effectively from Nairobi it will flow to the country headquarters immediately.

The problem now is that it is not only the President who can claim to understand this inner dynamic of political power. Most senators and governors already do and they are soon likely to be joined by millions of ordinary Kenyans who are today much more informed than their fathers and grandfathers were in 1965 when our Independence Senate was abolished by Uhuru Kenyatta’s father.

What we are now witnessing is not just a fight over which of our two houses of Parliament will emerge supreme but whether political power in this country will begin to flow away from Nairobi and the Presidency to the counties and thus to the senators and the governors.

In a nutshell, that is the essence of this struggle and it is one which not even the President himself can today tell you how it is going to play out.  Make no mistake.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

dominicodipo@yahoo.co.uk