Governors must stop running riot across offices
The newly elected governors have hit the ground running. Eager to reform their counties to enable them deliver on their huge promises to residents, these governors have taken up this agenda with gusto.
The key areas the governors seem to have taken aim at are the bloated workforce, the ailing health systems and pending bills. No doubt, these are areas which have caused the residents of counties a lot of heartaches.
Nairobi governor, Johnson Sakaja, has already stripped the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) of its role in revenue collection for Nairobi County Government and introduced a new parking system. He has also given the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) its marching orders.
Homa Bay governor, Gladys Wanga, has already sent packing almost the entire human resources office of the county ostensibly to give room for an audit.
Laikipia governor, Joshua Irungu, reinstated all sacked doctors in his county on day one of his tenure, signing off a return to work formula that promises the reinstated staff millions in immediate payment of back pay.
In Kisii, the governor, Simba Arati, undertook an elaborate “audit” of drivers to determine whether there were any ghost workers. The highly publicised exercise saw all drivers and their county vehicles paraded in Gusii Stadium ostensibly to match vehicles to drivers.
In Malindi, governor Gideon Mung’aro has sacked all chief officers, and sent most of the CECs on terminal leave. Further, the Machakos governor, Wavinya Ndeti, sent all staff in the governor’s office on compulsory leave.
And the beat goes on across the country.
The urgency by governors to make an impact on service delivery is commendable. However, how they are going about it is all wrong. Such sweeping, seemingly little thought-out actions, are known as roadside declarations. They may be populist in nature and earn kudos for the governors in the short term, but they are not sustainable. Indeed, these moves are very destabilizing to the county governments, and will impact the very service delivery the governors want to enhance very adversely indeed.
Governors need to undertake reforms in their counties. However, these reforms need to be based on sound parameters informed by data on the state of the county, and the needs of service delivery going forward.
Entering the office firing from the hip without even the benefit of being briefed by the outgoing administration is setting themselves up for failure.
Reforms take a lot of hard work and thinking through. Not to mention of the need to finance a lot of the measures undertaken.
Obviously, the counties need a lot of assistance in recalibrating their operations for efficiency and to eliminate graft and wastage. There’s no shortage of public institutions that can offer them the assistance they need, if only they will be open to it.
Further, payroll cleanup is a very complex and intricate matter that has been a big challenge to even better-resourced government institutions in the country.
Governors, you are not at war with the outgoing regimes. They might not have lived up to the expectations of the electorate- that is why you are there. But campaigning and running a bureaucracy and making it efficient are two very different things.
The governors must cool down, take stock, organize their delivery architecture in terms of personnel and systems, and then put together a programme to deal with the challenges in terms of urgency. This need not take too much time and is likely to yield the desired results soonest.
Knee-jerk reactions like the country is witnessing currently- however urgent the challenges the governors have met- will bog them down very quickly, and they’ll get mired in legal battles that will severely hamper their capacity to deliver.
