By Allan Olingo

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Two-thirds of Kenya’s members of the county assemblies and half the governors were sent home by the voters in the August 8 election.

The electorate sent home 25 governors out of 47, while only 376 county legislators succeeded in their re-election bid. Their performance was characterised by corruption and wastage of public funds.

Six of the governors who lost their seats have cases in court over governance and corruption allegations. Out of the 22 governors who retained their seats, one has been indicted by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission for misuse of funds.

Their term was also bogged down by strikes, wasteful foreign trips that saw allowances running into millions of dollars and a poor development record.

“In the debut operationalisation of the county government structure, we saw most of the elected officials choose to pilferage. We saw many meaningless benchmarking tours and infighting on who controls the public kitty in order to loot. This could explain the displeasure exhibited by voters through the ballot,” said the National Taxpayers Association (NTA) chairman Peter Kubebea.

Last year, the senate county public accounts and investment committee raised concern that many counties are still grappling with audit queries especially on how they spent their funds.

“Many of the funds that could have enhanced development have not been accounted for by virtually all counties,” said Boni Khalwale, who was a member of the oversight committee.

Citizen’s Report Card

In December, a report by NTA dubbed the Citizen’s Report Card, which assessed the use of public funds by counties, showed that more than $3 billion of taxpayers’ money in the past three years had been wasted by counties.

The counties also suffered countless health strikes by both doctors and nurses, which crippled the health sector for almost a quarter of their five-year term.

In the past five years, 32 of the 47 counties saw health professionals go on strike and the governors blamed it on the national government and accused President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration of sabotage.

“The government unfairly blamed us for running down the health sector yet more than half the funds meant for this devolved function were retained at the national government level,” said Peter Munya, the former Council of Governor chair. He is one of the governors who lost his seat.

However, the decision to send the leaders home will come with a $26.5 million bill in send-off packages prescribed by law.

Kamotho Waiganjo, a former commissioner of the defunct Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution, said it is now more expensive to send public officials home because of the severance packages they are entitled to.

“We need to review the gratuity model for exiting elected officials as it is becoming a huge burden. It isn’t sustainable from a budgeting perspective,” said Mr Waiganjo.

According to the Auditor-General’s 2016/17 report, the current annual wage bill for county governments stands at $168.1 million for about 50,000 staff, while the development budget stands at $503.1 million annually. Out of the $1.64 million the counties received last year, they spent $1.14 billion — almost all of it — on recurrent expenditure.

At the start of their terms, several governors hosted forums to attract investors and launch ambitious multi-million dollar projects, but these did not work out due to bureaucracy. The national government did not actualise the trade pacts signed by the counties and the country lacks a legal framework to guide agreements between county governments and foreign investors.

“There is an urgent need to empower counties to directly attract foreign investments through public-private partnerships,” the counties executive initiative said last month.

The county governments also raised issues with their inability to borrow directly as there is also no legal framework for this.

Almost half the counties grappled with lack of money to pay their staff, claiming they did not have the money or it was delayed. In the past three years, the counties had a back and forth with the national government over delays in releasing money.

They also accused the national government of sabotaging their economic development by not allowing them to borrow from commercial banks or externally. Current laws in Kenya do not allow county governments to borrow externally, but does allow them to receive grants with the approval of the National Treasury.