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{
    "id": 779505,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/779505/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 398,
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    "speaker_name": "",
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    "content": "Columbia in Washington was to enable the Federal Government to have a place where the headquarter of the country would be. That same concept was in Canberra in Australia where they also created the headquarters of Australia. We made a mistake to make Nairobi a county because it was meant to be the headquarters of the Republic of Kenya. That responsibility which makes Nairobi a headquarter of the Republic of Kenya should have created an opportunity for how Nairobi would be managed differently. I also still believe that it was a mistake to have 47 counties, although it was a political compromise as a result of political expedience and odd economics. To make sense of what counties are, see what our counties are doing at the moment. A county like Elgeyo Marakwet cannot even collect Ksh60,000,000 in revenue because there is such a small area that the entity itself cannot create the economies of scale required for a county to run sustainably by collecting taxes. Even the compromise in drafting Article 209 of the Constitution to ensure that counties were only collecting licence fees and the parking fees was arrived at because it was impossible to allow another 47 entities to come up with a taxation regime that would raise local revenue. Had we agreed to have seven, eight or ten at most, those regions would have been economically viable and politically strong. If you look at the pressure that people have, by saying devolution was meant to remove the pressure from the presidency and the centre. That has not succeeded because it ended up that the county government became so small that it cannot answer and properly check as an entity by itself. I sat in the taskforce on devolved government, we drafted the County Government Act, the Intergovernmental Relations Act, I played a key role in creation of what is called the Summit, the Council of Governors, and all those entities together with my colleagues who served in the taskforce. Since, we were looking for a way of bringing together the counties to create that political ability to engage the centre so that you have checks and balances. If you had a governor of Nyanza region, whether the lower or upper Nyanza or a governor of Rift Valley or South Rift or North Rift. There should have been a governor of eastern Kenya, Makueni County combined with Machakos and maybe up to Taita Taveta, depending on how you agree in the delimitation of boundaries. Eight to ten governors would have lessened that desire for the presidency. Since when you are a governor many of these individuals or citizens clamoring for the presidency and getting 20,000 votes, 40,000 votes would have extended that energy to a more useful position of a governor; a real Governor, so to speak. So, the problem that Sen. Mutula Kilonzo Jnr. is trying to solve here – even as we deal with the boundary problem – is because initially, you just had a district. There was, therefore, no reason to have proper coordinates of a district because it was in one centralised system of government. We took administrative agents of a centralised system of government, put them as they were without doing clear boundaries and then said they were going to be independent. I argued in the task force on devolved government and soon after we finished that exercise that the issue of boundaries is the problem of the future; and this is how. It may be that, today that you come from a county that has no boundary problem with another The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}