KIEYAH: Why security should not be devolved

The rising insecurity that has engulfed Kenya continues to dictate the national political pulse. Seemingly, there is an underlying public perception that incidents of insecurity have not been adequately addressed.

This perception of the national government’s shortcoming has resulted in a proposal to devolve security matters to county governments.

Surprisingly, the proposal has gained public traction as some governors continue to drum up support. However, this proposal should be rejected for economic reasons.

Every Kenyan is constitutionally entitled to the right to freedom and security, which includes the right not to be subjected to any form of violence from either public or private sources. Rightly so, the Constitution assigns the provision of security to the national government.

In general, any state provides some goods to its citizens directly and regulates the provision of other goods by the private sector. The state’s choice of direct provision of regulations is determined by technical characteristics of the goods in question, which may lead to market failure.

Essentially, there are two types of goods; public and private. Private goods are products or services provided by private firms for profit. Pure public goods, on the other hand, are commodities or services that are provided without profit to all members of a society, usually by the government.

Pure public goods have distinguishing characteristics from private goods. They lack rivalry, meaning one person’s enjoyment does not diminish or detract another person’s enjoyment. In addition, public goods are inclusive; it is infeasible or uneconomical to exclude others from enjoying their benefits.

This automatic inclusion gives individuals the incentive to ride for free by intentionally avoiding to pay for pure public goods.

Free-riding is a situation where one enjoys a benefit accruing from a collective effort, but contributes little or nothing to the effort. It is a source of market failure that prevents the private sector from providing pure public goods.

By inference, since the free-ride problem is attributable to the non-excludable element of public goods, then only the government can provide public goods. The government may overcome free-rider problems by taxing all beneficiaries of the public goods.

Security is a pure public good that once it is provided for, each person enjoys it independent of the other. It is also non-excludable because it would be economically infeasible to exclude others, including foreigners, from benefiting.

Granted that security is a pure public good, the issue is who is a better provider between the national and county governments. If security is devolved to county governments, the free-rider problem is likely to manifest, because one cannot control inter-county movement.

For instance, most people who work in Nairobi reside in neighbouring counties. It would be uneconomical for Nairobi to exclude part of its workforce simply because they are not county residents.

Furthermore, the provision of security will be compromised given the limited capacity of the county government to set and collect taxes.

The national government can tax the public more effectively than county governments. In other words, the national government has the ability to eliminate the free-rider problem by collecting sufficient tax revenues to fund the provision of security.

Security should not be devolved to counties because it is a pure public good. Upon provision, everyone enjoys it equally and independently. It is not also economically feasible to stop others from enjoying it. More importantly, the county lacks the ability to tax all the beneficiaries of security to fund it.

Prof Kieyah is a principal policy analyst at KIPPRA. Views expressed in this article are author’s own