What Can You Do With A Billion Shillings?

A common sense approach will suffice here - I don’t need you to go philosophical on me. Therefore, answers like become a billionaire fast (though precise) won’t cut it and neither will skepticism of the probability of such occurrence happening.

I will have to admit from the outset that I have come across a myriad of responses so far from posing the same question on various social media platforms and what is agreeable to almost everyone is that, with proper goals, that’s a huge amount of money capable of changing one’s life and that of the community drastically and for good.

Ultimately, everything boils down to what they would do for others.

Seven years down the road, the drafters of The Constitution of Kenya, 2010 did not envisage us implementing only five per cent of it (like we sometimes do with our brains) as far as governance is concerned.  

I am specifically referring to Schedule IV of the Constitution that deals with devolution. The two levels of government are meant to ensure that services reach the mwananchi at the grassroots level, but as it is now, it is an avenue for the local big boys to coalesce and loot public resources, offer plum jobs at County level, at the expense of the County development.

All this noise you hear surrounding the presidency in so far as the hotly contested 2017 elections is concerned is borne of lack of the shallowest insight in to the doctrine of devolution as espoused in the constitution.

This distraction is a well-calculated strategy spearheaded by the Council of Governors who, taking advantage of the public's ignorance cry hoarse over the inadequacy of the resources counties receive annually in order to divert attention from the counties as they loot the public coffers,

One billion

It would not be so hard to see why the governors would actually form a council to protect their own individual interests considering that each of the 47 counties controls a kitty of about Ksh.4 billion ($40 million) per year!

With such an annual budget, and growing, one would imagine that very few, if any, of the 47 counties would still be experiencing independence - Kenya era problems, seven years after devolution. 

But alas! There is still no medicine in hospitals, clean water is insufficient, and most public schools are overcrowded and still have poor infrastructure with substandard facilities; there’re people dying of hunger and so forth.

Amazingly in some counties, donors, well-wishers and the national government itself (through the Facility Improvement Fund) have had to chip in through funds drives to help communities facing the ravages of drought!

One wonders how County Governors live with themselves if they cannot set aside an emergency kitty from their annual allotment for such eventualities.

The citizenry needs to wake up and demand for better accountability rather than wait for the report from the Auditor General which is always two or three years late and is often filled with numbers and  jargon that escape the untrained eye.

If the county assembly representatives cannot discharge their mandate effectively through their representation and oversight roles, then the citizen is given powers by the Constitution under Chapter 1 to seek explanation from those who hold public resources in trust for the mwananchi.

All this stems from failures by local leadership to empower the populace by making information accessible. Such leadership thrives when the locals are ignorant of the affairs and mandate of the county government.

If every citizen can read and re-read our Constitution as it is, and hold the elected leadership to account during the various public participation forums, we can change the course of our country for the better.

Otherwise, we may have to wait for another five year cycle to repeat the same mistake, and as it has been said, opportunity is never lost, but it is passed on to other people.