Namwamba: County ward reps should be watchdogs not bloodbounds

By Ababu Namwamba

As a legislator, and more so as head of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), I intimately appreciate the value of accountability and individual political responsibility in the conduct of public affairs. Indeed accountability is a constitutional tenet. And a moral imperative. If you hold public office, this must inhere in your very soul. As spelt out in Article 73 of the Constitution, “…authority assigned to a State officer is a public trust to be exercised in a manner that…brings honour to the nation and dignity to the office, and promotes public confidence in the integrity of the office”. Article 226 (5) further enacts personal liability for financial misadventure.

Having also served as a Cabinet minister only recently, I have had the unique privilege of experiencing accountability and political responsibility from the dialectic angles of the hunter and the hunted. This unique “cocktail” of experiences has taught me that those who bear the mandate to oversight others bear a divine duty. A duty they must exercise with utmost honour and responsibility. In deploying the instruments of oversight they must be as accountable for their actions as those whose deeds they bring under scrutiny. Anything else is double standards. A classic case of preaching water and drinking wine. Ultimately, those who oversight must never forget that they are watchdogs, not bloodhounds.

Their brief is to watch over the public good. Not to hound to hell those mandated to exercise executive power.

It is against this backdrop that we must focus attention on impeachments in the counties. The Embu and Kericho county assemblies have respectively voted to impeach their governors. The first Kiambu county assembly speaker and the Nairobi county executive for Transport have also fallen on this sword. MCAs have been handed a legislative arsenal loaded with a variety of oversight weaponry. They include investigation, caution, naming and shaming, surcharge, censure and impeachment. Of all these, impeachment is the lethal missile.

You don’t fire unless you are crystal clear you have located and isolated the target. The right target. The target whose culpability is beyond doubt. When you press the launch button, you know you will cause maximum damage. And so you don’t take chances. It is not child’s play. Like the mythical Sword of Damocles, this missile’s most potent force lies not in how often it lands, but in the mere horror of the threat of its landing.

I lead from the front in encouraging MCAs to place county regimes under strict scrutiny.

I have personally championed efforts to develop Accountability Kenya, a nationwide joint initiative for all actors in financial accountability. Public Accounts Committees in all 47 counties are part of Accountability Kenya.

I have similarly been consistent in rebuking any county government showing the slightest signs of devolving the bad manners of national government, including corruption, indolence and inertia. And so my caution here must not be mistaken for excusing impropriety.

 

I say yes, let MCAs oversight governors and their governments; yes, let them deploy any oversight weapon. But this must be done in good faith and with utmost responsibility…the ultimate aim being to aid not to hobble the progress of devolution. Impeachment or the threat of it must not be used as a tool to threaten governors or unduly influence them to bend to the whims of the county assembly. And if the governor can be impeached for misconduct, so can an MCA be recalled by popular vote for abuse of office and privilege. For what is good for the gander, must surely be good for the goose too! Even Christ teaches in Mathew 7:12 that “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.”

While MCAs must be encouraged to be vigilant, their actions must similarly be subjected to public scrutiny. Let us not rush headlong to set precedents that could become seeds for damaging discord and instability. Writing in The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli cautions: “But men of little prudence will do a thing for immediate gain without recognising the poison it bears for the future…the man who does not recognise ills at their inception does not have true wisdom…”

We are living in a time defined by acute “trust deficit”. Yet we must also appreciate that no people have ever developed as a result of focusing on their weaknesses. Even as county assemblies and county governments check and balance each other, they must also work as partners in our very noble devolution project. As Yogi Bera warns, “you got to be careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there!”