Counties

Order, Senator Kajwang! Order!

In a recent address in Homa Bay, Senator Moses Kajwang’ proposed that Kenya reduce its counties from 47 to 13. He did so with the performative confidence of a man who believes he has uttered something profound. What he has actually done is expose the intellectual hollowness of the neoliberal worldview that sees the state not as the architect of the common good but as a clumsy ledger item to be trimmed or liquidated at the earliest opportunity.

Kajwang’s proposition is not new, nor is it uniquely Kenyan. It is part of a broader ideological virus that has long plagued nations across the Global South—a derivative echo of the same worldview espoused by the likes of Milton Friedman and Grover Norquist. These apostles of market fundamentalism have, for decades, sought to reduce government to what Norquist once grotesquely described as a size "small enough to drown in a bathtub." 

The tragic outcome of their nihilism is playing out in America right now, where the Trump administration is dismantling the US government by deleting entire departments, including the Department of Education and the Consumer Protection Bureau, which help citizens fight big corporations when they defraud their customers. Now, social security and medical services for senior citizens and military veterans are also on the chopping block, all in the name of "balancing the budget by reducing the deficit". 

Meanwhile, trillion-dollar corporations that already have more cash at hand than the US government itself receive further tax breaks, which will further inflame the deficit. It's political malpractice on steroids.

That Senator Kajwang’, a lawmaker in a republic built on painful lessons of centralized power and ethnic exclusion, would recycle such historically illiterate and intellectually reckless proposals as are currently being espoused by the Trump administration is not merely disappointing—it is dangerous.

The suggestion to abolish counties in the name of “efficiency” is an accountant’s fantasy masquerading as political philosophy. It is the reduction of the state to a balance sheet, with no regard for the moral, historical, and strategic imperatives that underpin public governance. The Constitution of Kenya, 2010, did not emerge from a cost-benefit analysis. It was not conceived by actuaries. It was born of blood, betrayal, and the recognition that a hyper-centralized, winner-takes-all presidency was the single greatest threat to the survival of the Kenyan nation-state.

The 47 counties were not designed to generate profit. They were designed to generate peace.

Before 2010, state power in Kenya was organized around a predatory center. The presidency was the sole organ of patronage and violence. The 2007–2008 post-election violence was not an aberration; it was the logical culmination of decades of tribal supremacy struggles over who could access, monopolize, and weaponize the Presidency. 

Devolution was the corrective—a structural recalibration meant to diffuse power and provide every major community with a legitimate stake in the republic. In effect, devolution defused the time bomb.

What Kajwang’ proposes is to reassemble it.

Like the neoliberal technocrats before him—those who championed the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the 1980s and 90s—Kajwang’ reduces the state to a set of budget lines. SAPs decimated public institutions across Africa in the name of “efficiency” and “fiscal discipline.” In Kenya, they led to the hollowing out of the civil service. Extension officers—who had been the backbone of agricultural knowledge transfer—were dismissed en masse. The consequence? Kenya has not known food security since.

Now, Senator Kajwang’ wishes to apply the same thinking to our political institutions. But governance is not a business, and the citizen is not a customer. The role of government is not to turn a profit. It is to deliver the public good—often in ways that the private sector cannot, will not, or should not. This is not inefficiency. It is the nature of sovereignty.

Neoliberalism, with its fetish for privatization and deregulation, treats every state intervention as suspect and every public institution as bloated. It scorns political complexity and substitutes it with economic utilitarianism. It is precisely this worldview that Kajwang’ channels—wittingly or not—when he speaks of reducing counties, as though a unit of governance is merely a cost center, and not a vital node in the architecture of inclusion.

If this proposal were to be implemented, it would effectively return us to a pre-2010 configuration in which power was centralized, political marginalization was endemic, and ethnic alienation was routine. It would revitalize the zero-sum game that made presidential elections existential for entire communities. We would once again have to "capture Nairobi"—not just politically, but psychologically and violently.

It is telling that Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o, one of the intellectual architects of devolution, responded to Kajwang’s proposal with the sobriety of a scholar and the maturity of a statesman. He urged for serious national reflection—not populist tinkering. 

Nyong’o understands what Kajwang’ apparently does not: that nations are not managed like supermarkets.

A proper evaluation of devolution must ask more than whether counties generate "value for money." It must ask whether they have reduced political tensions, increased inclusion, expanded access to decision-making, and allowed citizens to participate meaningfully in the shaping of their destinies. On these metrics, counties have been imperfect, yes—but indispensable.

We can and should improve how counties function. We must demand transparency, fiscal discipline, and innovation. But we must also reject outright any attempt to collapse the very structure that has kept this nation from boiling over in the last decade. There is no economic gain worth the political chaos that would follow such reckless dismantling.

Senator Kajwang’s remarks are not just wrong—they are intellectually bankrupt, ideologically compromised, and historically blind. They do not belong in a mature constitutional democracy. 

They belong in the dustbin of discredited neoliberal thought, next to the SAPs, the privatization mantras, and the broken promises of the Washington Consensus.

Patrick Kariuki is the editor of The Kenyan Observer