Roughly one year ago, at a time when the political temperatures were just beginning to rise in anticipation of the March 4th General Election, I was asked to prepare an analysis of the evolving political landscape, specifically with reference to the new offices of Senator and Governor.
I remember one of the conclusions then was that anyone elected to the office of governor would have a particularly hard time. Indeed, the conclusion was that whereas about 70% of all MPs routinely lose their seats in each election, for governors, it was likely that about 90% of them would lose.
The logic behind this was simple: there was an unbridgeable gap between what most Kenyans expected from ‘devolution’ and what the average governor would be able to deliver.
The billions of shillings being mentioned back then as ‘devolution funds’ may have seemed incredibly large sums to many Kenyans. But if you had any idea of development economics, it was painfully clear that these amounts were pitifully inadequate when applied to an area as large as a county.
The issue here was not so much the sums in themselves, as the nature of the starting point: when you are expected to serve a desperately poor and rural electorate (which was the reality for most counties) then a sum like five billion shillings, can readily vanish into your county, leaving very little sign of what it achieved. Certainly your electorate will not find their lives much improved.
This sets you up for being relentlessly attacked by your rivals at the next election of having “wasted taxpayers money” with the implied suggestion that you must have all along been corruptly diverting money into your private accounts.
So the odd thing here was that whereas in many other (and more advanced) nations with some kind of federal system of government, being elected governor is often the first crucial step towards seeking even higher office (as President or Prime Minister) in Kenya it was exactly the reverse: if you were elected governor, the consequences would likely be such a complete collapse of your popularity as to end your political career.
In the US, in particular, there is no surer path to the presidency than a governorship. President Barack Obama and VP Joe Biden may both be former senators; but former presidents like George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan were all governors at the time they set their sights on the White House.
In the US, governors get a golden opportunity to demonstrate their ability to deliver on their election promises, and thus gain national prominence. While in the Kenyan context, being elected governor would set the ambitious Kenyan politician on a one way journey to political oblivion.
That, at any rate, was the conclusion of that analysis late last year.
And I estimated that it would take a tripling of 'devolved funds' to give any governor a fighting chance of making the kind of widespread positive impact, which could lead to reelection.
Well, it seems that others did much the same calculations over what a governor’s chances were of being reelected, and came to much the same conclusion – that only a 300% increase in the funds allocated to the counties, could allow governors to go anywhere near fulfilling the expectations of their electorate.
But unlike those of us whose interest in the matter ended with an academic assessment, I now suspect that others who had come to this same conclusion decided to do something about it.
The unavoidable next step thereafter was for the governors to make a resolute effort to get their hands on more money. And from this has arisen the resolve by the governors to push for a dramatic increase of ‘devolved funds’ from the "not less than 15%" initially scheduled, to the current focus on “not less than 45%”.
The reason I feel certain that the governors will in the end – one way or another – succeed in getting a constitutionally-mandated 45% of national revenues dedicated to the devolved funds, is that this is, for them, a life-and-death struggle.
Their only slim chance of reelection lies in getting their hands on the additional funds, without which they cannot hope to do anything memorable for their counties.
If they fail to get this constitutional amendment passed, then they might as well not bother offering themselves for reelection.
And under the burden of such considerations, the governors will not give up until they succeed.
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