Governors reject survey on their performance ranking

The Council of Governors (CoG) has rejected a survey that ranked performance of governors, alleging it was a political strategy to malign the leadership of counties.

CoG, in a statement signed by Chairperson Wycliffe Oparanya, said county governments are not comparable as each is unique and bears distinctive milestones and individual success stories and challenges.

"A homogeneous performance criteria cannot be applied across the 47 county government," read the statement.

The CoG criticised the pollster, All Africa Advisors (AAA), rejecting its assertion that it had administered a self-assessment tool to all counties where each county government was required to provide evidence to support their scores on the questionnaires.

"We would like to clarify that to date, the Council of Governors, which is the coordinating body of all the 47 county governments, has not received the alleged questionnaire and in effect none of the county governments have," Oparanya said.

He said the CoG is aware that the Statistics (Amendment) Act, 2019, streamlines the management of information at the national and county levels by ensuring data collection and processing is conducted in accordance with international best practices and standards.

The Statistics Act further provides that any agency wishing to conduct a survey at the national or local level shall seek the approval of the board established under the Act, added the statement.

"The council is of the considered view that the company has no locus to purport to have conducted a survey in the country with Kenya’s interest at heart," Oparanya said.

Steven Kenyatte, the head of survey at AAA, while releasing the results on Tuesday, said they had interviewed 1,401 respondents in all 47 counties from June to August, this year.

Oparanya said the council noted that the pollster ranks Kenya as the seventh most dangerous country to live in whereas there are other obvious war-torn countries that were not featured in the opinion poll.

"This shows that AAA is a company determined to destroy the image of the country and counties. The Council of Governors is equally aware that this is a political strategy to malign the leadership in the counties," Oparanya said.

CoG demanded an apology from AAA.

Legal action

"We demand an unequivocal apology from Mr Steven Kanyatte and his company, failure to which the council shall take legal action," Oparanya said in the statement.

He noted that some media houses have begun to use the poll to attack governors.

"This is very unfortunate and unfair and is turning out to be a case of someone who is being judged without being heard. We call upon the media to desist from giving airtime to fraudulent pollsters. As at today, no county is worse off because of devolution," Oparanya said.