supposed to be equivalent to handouts .
That is why that county in the northeastern Kenya was up in arms protesting the ostentatious display of wealth at the launch of a gubernatorial campaign while the residents of the county are facing draught and famine . That is the reality in a lot of counties , totally disconnected with the electorate .
Another interesting twist in the constitution is that we are sure the drafters never intended the Member of a County Assembly , a ward representative , with the minimum education qualifications required for a politician , to become the most powerful politician in Kenya .
The drafters who were most concerned about the president not having any direct authority over the governor , in the spirit of check and balances , ensured that the president could not in any legal way direct the governor as to how the county is run .
In the same spirit of checks and balances , that power to check and ensure the governor did not become tin gods in their respective counties was given to the MCAs who had the power to impeach an errant governor and remove him from office as long as the senate ratified the impeachment .
The result is a weird scenario in Kenya where a corky governor can , and they have , hurl insults at the president with no repercussions yet the same governor walks on glass when dealing with the MCAs as they can engineer his exit .
So governors , unwilling to spend countless hours arguing with semi-literate MCAs have found it easier to acquiesce to the MCAs sometimes ridiculous demands or even buy their silence outright to enable the governor operate without looking over his shoulder .
The gubernatorial lion that roars at the president is a mouse when dealing with his MCAs and the best the president can do in this circumstance is to complain and risk looking weak or delay the county allotments since he can ’ t even withhold them .
In reality the person driving the country ’ s agenda is the MCA , the least qualified politician in our system and if you get the feeling that the country may be on autopilot could be because the country is actually being run by touts and carwash operators .
Those inclined to be doubtful about the scenario described above just need to check out the number of highly qualified people who will be vying for the MCA position in the coming elections . People have discovered , many the hard way , just how powerful an MCA is .
As comical as it may sound , the MCA , who runs the county by default , is the same person running the country , also by default . There are so many checks and balances in this country that in the end the whole country is checkmated .
Don ’ t forget that the drafters of the constitution are the same ones that copy pasted a constitution from somewhere and forgot to delete the senate from their final draft hence saddling Kenyans with an expensive yet totally ineffective position .
The senate has become the politician ’ s welfare club where seasoned politicians retire to cool their heels while they contemplate their next political move . Senators are politicians in an induced coma and they contribute nothing really tangible on the political forum .
They owe their existence to the strange obsession that the constitution drafters had to the ideal of checks and balances . In this case the form took over the substance and allowed the creation of an expensive political halfway house for an already overrepresented electorate .
In the current political dispensation you hardly ever hear about our members of parliament breaking sweat for the citizenry unless it is with regard to a financial scandal or personal misbehavior of an individual MP which may cause him or her to be newsworthy .
We were invited to a meeting where a current MP in Nairobi was launching his bid to become the next governor in Nairobi where he stated that we only need to look at his track record for us to confirm that he had the qualities needed to transform Nairobi .
The only problem was that we did not know he was an actual MP in Nairobi let alone being familiar with the so called track record . What exactly do MPs do in Kenya ? Ideally they should vote for new laws and policies and raise issues affecting their constituencies .
But in our current over-represented political arena they are drowned in the cacophony of voices and you are likely not to know who your MP is especially in main cities unless that MP has acquired notoriety by doing something that attracts the newsman , usually a negative thing .
This in itself is quite a dangerous situation to find ourselves in because an unscrupulous MP , when not plotting to increase their emoluments , could easily collude with others in the pipeline to pass laws that are self-serving but which are not in the best interest of Kenyans at large .
Such a situation nearly happened when an MP sponsored an amendment to an existing law that would de-gazette large tracts of protected forest land and leave them at the whim of individual counties to determine whether they should be protected or not .
Kenya not only hosts UNEP but is committed to increasing the forest cover of the country to at least ten percent . So why would we as a country even attempt to unprotect the already protected forests if the motive behind such a move is not selfserving ?
The only MPs that we seem to know what they do is the women representatives who are also another anomaly since reserved seats are meant to address the representation of minority groups which do not have sufficient numbers to win a competitive political position .
The constitution goes further to stipulate that a third of the positions in government will be held by women and that political parties will nominate a third of women to contest elective positions on pain of expulsion should they fail to do so .
That stipulation is the most ignored in Kenya today and if ever it gets enforced then we would have to go for fresh elections . It is dangerous to stipulate anything in a constitution and then have it ignored since that is how the culture of impunity takes root .
Perhaps the drafters of the constitution were being overly simplistic and ambitious by imagining that you could legislate representation since the electorate is supposed to freely choose and the absence of well-organized political parties militate against this objective .
The constitution is also ominously vague on the definition of political parties and exactly how these apparently important organs of democracy are operated yet we actually have a registrar of political parties who we
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