In normal and peaceful times, executive orders and government circulars don’t make newspaper headlines. In most countries, many people don’t even know that they exist.
This makes the week’s noisy debate around Executive Order Number 1 of 2019 rather interesting. This is the order issued by President Uhuru Kenyatta on the co-ordination and implementation of national government.
The organisation of government (ministerial mandates and functions — basically the division of labour across government) was already set out in Executive Order Number 1 of 2018. This new memo apparently streamlines the technocratic implementation and communication of national government operations at national, regional and county levels. That’s what the bureaucrats would say.
However, government is a political institution too, so speculation about the role of the National Cabinet Committee, and its chairperson, Interior Secretary Fred Matiang’i in relation to that of Deputy President William Ruto (and the politics of 2022) comes as no surprise, especially for Kenya. Let’s leave that to political pundits.
A second interpretation is validly concerned about the return of the pre-2010 constitution provincial administration, at the expense of devolution. However, today we have 47 county governments which are more firmly established in a constitutional sense than the previous 175 local authorities.
Yet, as long as national government retains a strong presence at the grass roots, it will see fit to focus on supervising, coordinating and communicating on the delivery of its programmes and projects at this level.
Don’t forget the difficulties faced by the Jubilee Administration in convincing the public about its first term achievements at both national and county level during the last election.
The different question we should ask is how to reduce national government to policy, standards and quality assurance, while building county government capabilities to deliver programmes and projects that enhance service delivery to citizens in a participatory and accountable fashion.
In other words, if national government does the correct things badly, and county governments do the wrong things well, how do we get our “one nation” government to do the correct things well? Let’s leave that to our constitutional gurus.
There is a third, related angle to this circular. Late last year, Mr Kenyatta issued a directive halting new public projects. Since then, the National Treasury has developed guidelines on public investment management (PIM).
The 2019 Budget Policy Statement (BPS) makes major promises around the “Big Four” and its “enablers”, but also outlines a significant commitment to fiscal consolidation.
Outside of the usual language around raising revenues, restricting growth in recurrent spending, prioritising development spending, PIM is the fiscal consolidation “wild card”.
As the BPS notes, a new PIM Unit in National Treasury will “enhance efficiency in identification and implementation of priority social and investment projects … streamline the initiation, execution and delivery of public investment projects …(and) curtail runaway projects costs, eliminate duplications and improve working synergy among implementation actors for timely delivery of development projects”.
Now take another look at the functions of the new Cabinet Committee — supervisory leadership through the delivery cycle of national government programmes and projects — receiving reports, providing guidance on implementation, monitoring and evaluation and ensuring proper resource utilisation and target outcome realisation. Those of the new Technical Committee cover planning, budgeting, implementation, coordination, monitoring and reporting around programmes and projects.
Basically, the BPS speaks to a new structure to manage projects, and the circular a new, coordination structure for such project management. So it might just be as simple as that, a technical arrangement.
Here are a couple of final reflections. First, will counties see this new implementation and coordination arrangement as a threat to their space, or as an opportunity for a partnership in development? Simply, how are counties, many of which lack even the basic “Organisation of Government” circular, configuring themselves to engage with national government, especially on the “Big Four’ and its enablers?
Then there are our three “blind spots”. For national government, the reform of parastatals which seem to be our new bastions of corruption. For county governments, the need for local economic development (LED) as a basis for generating own source revenue (OSR) to reduce their over-reliance on national government largesse. For both, how to deal with bloated workforces and growing wage bills.
Watch this space. The plot thickens.
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