It seems preposterous to claim that Kenyans do not care about resource distribution. But that is what I am going to claim. Hear me out and then prove me wrong.

On Sunday, June 19, the Daily Nation ran a story about protesters in Nairobi, ostensibly aimed at understanding their motivations. One was quoted as saying the following, “We are not represented in government… just look at the distribution of government leadership positions and you will know what I’m saying. If going to the street is the only way we can make them hear us, then go we must.”

There is nothing remarkable about this statement. It is the kind of thing we hear every day. And it suggests that distribution is actually at the heart of the grievances that not only motivate young (and not so young) people to take to the streets, but also to vote for particular leaders, or support or castigate them on social media.

What I find remarkable is that this preoccupation with distribution does not seem to translate into even the most fleeting interest in actual decision-making about resource distribution.

Chest-thumping about whether the government does or does not “look” or “sound” like Kenya is all well and good, but shouldn’t people care not only about the façade but also about the actual policies that affect what they get or do not get from the state? It is easy enough to understand the emotional appeal of identity politics, but not the corresponding silence about actual distribution.

I have spoken many times about the abysmal level of debate about Kenya’s national revenue-sharing formula.

Neither media nor the public have interrogated the first or second formula to any significant degree, in spite of its representing the single most important distributional question in the country: Which regions will get more or less of the national pie? And the public’s representatives in parliament have in turn contributed almost nothing to this debate, perhaps aware that their constituents do not care much for it.

I was reminded of how little anyone cares about such matters by a recent interaction with the Senate. We had been trying to track the final second-generation formula for some time — that is, the one approved by the Senate that is now being reviewed by the National Assembly.

We had the parameter weights, which are a matter of public record and have been discussed briefly in the media. By this, I mean how much of the total pot of money is awarded to counties on the basis of population (45 per cent), land area (8 per cent), etc.

But this is not the formula itself, because what each county gets hinges on how population, land area, poverty, etc are actually calculated and, in some cases, combined.

When we asked the Senate to share what they had approved, we were given the parameter weights. When I insisted that we wanted to see the actual formula, I was informed that the Senate does not get involved “at that level.” Meaning that they simply accept whatever the CRA says about how population, poverty, and so on should be measured.

In this new formula, the CRA has introduced, and the Senate has accepted, a new “development” parameter that tracks access to electricity, water and roads. The way these variables are measured and combined can have enormous impacts on who gets what. Yet the Senate apparently has no interest in such questions.

Nor, apparently, does the media or any member of the public.

It is not simply revenue sharing among counties that appears to lack an interested constituency. Revenue sharing among constituencies is also of little or no interest.

Consider the Constituency Development Fund. CDF, which has been around for nearly 15 years and is one of the most discussed matters in public finance in Kenya.

The CDF publishes annual allocations to each constituency online. However, it is impossible to tell from looking at these allocations what formula is used to distribute them.

My colleagues and I recently tried to find the formula, since we cannot make sense of the allocations using the criteria in the law. It appears that the poverty data may be from a different source than what we have, and there may be other adjustments to the allocations.

The CDF Board told us they do not know how the allocations are done. We were advised by them, and by the National Treasury, to consult the Ministry of Devolution and Planning. When we followed up with contacts there, we were sent to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and back to the CDF Board.

We may eventually get an answer, but how is it possible that no one seems to know, or even care, about how a major fund like this is actually distributed? Do Kenyans really care about resource distribution? Someone please convince me that they do.

Jason Lakin is Kenya country director for the International Budget Partnership. E-mail: [email protected]