With the impeachment and term limit sideshows occupying much of the average person’s mind, an old issue seems to have been swept under rug. The One man One Vote One Shilling debate. Like everything in this country it has been politicized beyond common sense and reason. With the CBC implementation around the corner, the debate will once again come up. If it doesn’t it will entrench some of the perennial problems - marginalization, corruption and strained social services However, CBC ‘high school’ implementation is a post for another day.
Without any disrespect, the only thing counties seem to do fine on a good day is garbage collection. Even that they manage to screw up phenomenally as we have seen in Nyeri and Mombasa counties. That now puts things into perspective when we talk about critical services like healthcare, revenue collection and others. I personally think it was a mistake to devolve so many functions at once without any consideration. The counties are an experimental nightmare, let’s establish that before moving on. Their already weakened position is worsened by the fact that money is always delayed. An average county is in debt the same way as the state itself.
With the counties in shambles, the politics become red hot. Everyone is in their emotions. The person who has to walk for kilometers on end to visit a dispensary in rural Kenya is as angry as another who has to sit for hours without end at Thika Level 4 hospital because the patients are just too many. The politicians don’t waste to capitalize on this crisis for milage. In the end, the messenger becomes the message. Citizens are angry at the ’ tribal leader’ asking for more shares and the ‘marginalized leader’ who needs more money to complete his palace.
As long as we are a multicultural state, rural-urban migration and migration will have to be there. A person will move from Nyandarua to Mombasa, another will move from Kitui to Kisumu City. The patterns of movement are easy and established clearly. People move to towns and rarely to the empty hinterland. This can form a basis into how the national cake is divided especially when it comes to critical infrastructure.
Uhuru in his many failed experiments did stumble upon one great idea in his wrangles with Mike Sonko. The concept of NMS . The metropolitan services can be expanded then centralized to cover all major town above a certain population threshold. Of course the counties would still collect garbage(or not) but there’d be other smaller towns in their jurisdiction for them to screw up and loot. This idea makes everyone happy, watu wa towns like Eldoret, Nairobi, Thika, Kisumu… get good services irrespective of where you’re from and the counties continue eating. To some point this might work as National Metropolitan Service would push the counties to some level of accountability as jurisdiction matters in terms of bureaucracy.
If NMS is too complex, the capitation should be done as per the number of verified served citizens. Emphasis on verified. Rural hospitals can’t just be getting numbers out of their ass. The allocation of funds per verified number of served people can lay this debate to rest. If in rural town there’s an influx of people, money can be allocated to expand or build a hospital.
Therefore at the core of this issue is a communication problem. We have allowed the wrong people to debate it. It should be the hospitals, the school PTAs and BOMs and water service’s boards among others pushing this debate. This way we can have real data, well articulated problems and concrete solutions.