O
chieng remembers being perched
for hours on end on top of a rock
overlooking the road on the first
Saturday of every month hoping to be the
first to get a glimpse of his father as he
came back from that town called Kisumu.
As Ochieng was growing up, Kisumu
was a fabled town where things good
and marvelous happened and he had
been promised by his father that if he
performed well in school and was well
behaved he would one day be allowed to
accompany his dad to Kisumu.
Ochieng would seat mesmerized for hours
as his father told him about the strange
colored men who spoke in funny sounds
who were working with the white men and
were the ones that had brought the houses
that moved on iron rails to Kisumu.
Ochieng’s father was a story teller par
excellence and was not beyond adding a
pinch of salt to his stories to make them
even more wondrous as Ochieng later
found out. Every time his father went to
Kisumu there was a new and better story
to regale the family.
But the true reason that Ochieng was
always impatient for his father to come
back from those monthly trips was because
his father would come with a long loaf of
bread called Elliot’s that was wrapped in a
checked blue wax paper and was the treat
of the month.
On sighting the father Ochieng would
run down the road to meet him and carry
the basket that he would be carrying and
get to smell the sweet aroma of the bread
that would not be eaten until the next day
as a Sunday special.
Ochieng would them stake claim on the
end crust on the basis that he was the
one that had gone to meet the father
and he had the monthly school report
to prove that he had earned the right by
performance to choose that particular cut.
The other siblings found this argument
tenuous and unfair and lobbied to have
what they saw as preferential treatment
changed. To end the controversy the
father decreed that the crust was his to
decide who ate it but normally gave it out
on rotation or reward as he saw fit.
We would be wise to
remember that coun-
ties were a political
and not an economic
creation and the no-
ble goal of devolu-
tion which was meant
to deliver services to
the grassroots was hi-
jacked by politicians
and shamelessly con-
verted into a bread
sharing scheme.
How interesting that decades later,
bread would still be the metaphor for
how we conduct political business. More
interesting is the fact that our national
political leaders are not much better at
sharing bread as Ochieng’s incessantly
squabbling siblings were.
Bread got into political prominence
during the ‘Nusu Mkate’ era after Kenyans
decided to butcher each other on account
of disputed elections. The internationally
brokered solution to our problem was to
decide to share the bread in a way that set
an unfortunate precedent.
That arrangement doubled the number
of ministries and apart from creating
a bloated administration it created the
perception that the government had
inexhaustible resources to be shared out
and everyone could dip their fingers in
endlessly.
Worse was the fact that Kenya literally
had to create jobs and the consequence
was a lot of people in important positions
that had no real work to do and these idle
functionaries started to squabble among
themselves in search of relevance.
So when Kenyans wrote a constitution,
they envisaged a national loaf that would
be sliced into forty seven pieces so that
every Kenyan has a fair share of the bread,
as it turned out this was socialist idealism
because that was not how reality worked.
But the counties had been created and
as we soon learned most of them were
unviable and could not even sustain
themselves. Yet each county was created
with a massive county government
machinery that had to be resourced and
sustained.
We would be wise to remember that
counties were a political and not an
economic creation and the noble goal of
devolution which was meant to deliver
services to the grassroots was hijacked
by politicians and shamelessly converted
into a bread sharing scheme.
What we ended up creating was a giant
welfare state that did not benefit the
intended citizens but was a huge money
spinner for political busybodies who
soon realized that as the constitution was
formulated they could bully the national
government.
Fortunately for us, the coalition
government had a time limit and therefore
we were able to sort out that mess before
it caused us more harm and is the real
reason that even in the political impasse
that was witnessed last year, ‘Nusu Mkate’
was not an option.
But the counties are entrenched in the
constitution and we have realized that the
counties are such a resource drain because
rather than fund development, what
they have become is a huge employment
bureau for those who can get employed.
In fact the first so called crisis that the
new constitution faced was a cry by the
governors that the funding levels were too
low and the counties could not sustain
their operation. The Council of Governors
(COG) had become a powerful lobby.
Part of the illusion that devolution is
working wonders in the counties is
the fact that there is a lot of money in
circulation in the counties but that is due
partly to the huge salary bill that is paid
out monthly to unproductive staff fueling
inflation.
The other money in circulation is the
county funds that are stolen through
fraudulent tendering systems which have