EDITORIAL: Outgoing county chiefs must preserve property

For the first time in Kenya’s history, we are witnessing the transition from outgoing governors and their executive teams to the next.

This follows nearly five years of devolution that now look to have taken root unlike in the 1960s when the Executive managed to snuff life out of majimbo even before it learned to walk.

To a large extent, Kenyans are proud of the successes of devolution — largely, attributable to the State, Parliament, constitutional agencies, the citizenry and the non-state actors, not necessarily in that order.

Keen observers of the devolved units would, however, acknowledge that theft of public resources has been as rampant here as it is in the national government.

Many of the governors and their executives are retiring as wealthy people.

Today, our focus today is on half the governors and their officers that must leave office shortly.

At the constitutional level, it is very clear that the group will vacate office once the new office holders are sworn in.

Nevertheless, fired by greed, many might think of accelerating the plunder, especially now that they might never come back to their once ‘lucrative’ offices.

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At the moral level, they know well that it is wrong to loot, particularly after voters rejected them.

At the legal level though, any pilfering should be met with the full force of the law. In this case, we are not only talking the transition period, but the full term.

While it might be debatable on the moral front whether the new governors should hand the evidence of graft by their rivals, legally they would be committing a crime not to.

It would also send the wrong signal—even if self-preservation is the objective here.

We caution the outgoing (incoming too) teams to adhere to their constitutional duty and preserve public property.