DEVOLUTION IN KENYA: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR INCREASED PUBLIC PARTICIPATION, REDUCED CORRUPTION, AND IMPROVED SERVICE DELIVERY by HAYLEY ELSZASZ Ngonidzashe Munemo, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts MAY 11, 2016 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter I: History of Local Government in Kenya………………………………..32 Independence and the Kenyatta Presidency The Moi Era Period of Democratization Constitutional Reforms Chapter II: Participation and Corruption in Post-Devolution Kenya……..……...61 Participation in Kenya’s Local Governments Disengagement Corruption Post-2010 Actions to Counter Corruption Perceptions of Corruption Chapter III: Healthcare Delivery in Post-Devolution Kenya……………………..94 Constitutional Framework Financing Local Healthcare Healthcare in Counties Healthcare System Post-Devolution Health Sector Explanations and Predictions Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….120 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..137 ii Figures and Tables Figure 2.1 Voter Turnout 1992-2013 69 Table 0.1: Vote Margins in County Elections 24 Table 0.2: Party in Power: County Government 25 Table 0.3: Presidential Outcomes 2013 27 Table 0.4: Centrality of Counties 29 Table 1.1: The Provincial Administration: Kenyatta 36 Table 1.2: The Provincial Administration: Moi 46 Table 1.3: Devolved Local Government 57 Table 2.1: Voter Turnout 1992-2013 by Province 70 Table 2.2: Members of County Assemblies 77 Table 2.3: Qualities of the Most Corrupt Counties 83 Table 2.4: Bribes in Exchange for Services 91 Table 3.1: Tiers of Health Services 95 Table 3.2 Local Revenue & Central Government Grants 100 Table 3.3 Central Government Grants to the Counties 102 Table 3.4: Vaccination Rates by Province 113 Table 3.5: Births Delivered in a Health Facility by Province 114 Table 3.6: Infant Mortality by Province 115 Table 3.7: Antenatal Care by Province 116 Note on currency usage: All figures are given in Kenyan Shillings (KSh). The exchange rate on May 11, 2016 was US $1 = KSh 100.70. iii Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank Professor Munemo for his continuous guidance throughout this project. I am so thankful for your help every step of the way, from brainstorming potential topics with me while I was abroad to the final product. Thank you for making my first experience with African Politics so inspiring and for supporting my interest ever since. Your passion and wisdom motivated me to continually improve, learn more, and work harder. This thesis would not have been possible without you for many reasons. I could have not asked for a better advisor and mentor than Professor Munemo. Thank you to Professor Crowe and Professor Mahon for all of the advice throughout the process. I enjoyed our meetings together and appreciated how you challenged me to try new approaches, explore new themes, and make this work the best that it could be. I am also indebted to Professor Karuti Kanyinga of the University of Nairobi for his work on devolution in Kenya. His talk at the University of Oxford in Spring 2015 was instrumental in piquing my interest in this topic. I would also like to thank the girls of Fitch 3 for their incredible support - thank you for always celebrating with me, for being so beautiful and caring, and for sharing this college journey with me. Special acknowledgement to Wilfred for making sure I was fueled for writing. Thank you to my family for always being my biggest fans. Thank you to my dad for reading everything that I write, no matter how long, and being interested in everything that I do (or at least pretending to very convincingly). Thank you to my mom for putting up with my stressed phone calls with love and kindness. Finally, thanks to Hanna for being my best supporter and friend. iv Introduction In December 2007, civil conflict erupted in Kenya. Within a few days, over 1,500 Kenyans were dead and hundreds of thousands more were displaced.1 The triggering event was the contentious 2007 general election between incumbent Mwai Kibaki of the Party of National Unity (PNU) and Raila Odinga and his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) coalition. Although rooted in challenges to the results of the election, the conflict ignited existing grievances about political exclusion, land policy, and persisting ethnic tensions. The 2007 Kenya Crisis was sparked by an election that the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) proclaimed “too close to call.” However, ethnic conflict, land disputes, and weak institutions created the setting for this conflagration.2 Elections in Kenya were high-stakes, as there was more in the balance than mere policy preference. If the candidate from your ethnic group won, that candidate would likely reward you, his ethnic base, with desirable plots of land. If your ethnic candidate did not win, you would have had a chance of being displaced from your land and losing access to privileged resources. In essence, by the time of the 2007 general elections, electoral contests in Kenya had become zero-sum games in which land was used as a political tool to reward supporters and disenfranchise opponents. Kenyans perceived access to state resources 1 Figures range from 180,000 to 800,000 people displaced. 2 Susanne D. Mueller, “The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, no. 2 (July 2008): 199. through leaders from their own ethnic group as “the only way to eat.”3 Political parties were not programmatic - the main differences between them were their ethnic bases of support rather than concrete policy differences.4 Little wonder then that violence during and after elections in Kenya was a common occurrence. During the 1992 elections, for example, over 1,500 people were killed and about 300,000 displaced, mostly in the Rift Valley, through gang violence and extra-state forces sponsored by the KANU party.5 The importance of ethnicity as it related to material well being, however, hit a peak in 2007. Despite the contested nature of the election, the challenges to the outcome, and the ECK’s inability to proclaim a winner, Mwai Kibaki was secretly and silently sworn in within two days of the December 27 election. Soon after that, violence started in the ODM stronghold of Kisumu, and then spread to Nairobi, the Rift, and the rest of the country.6 Violence took on an ethnic nature very swiftly; ODM supporters from the Kalenjin, Luo, and Luhya ethnic groups attacked Kibaki supporters, who were largely Kikuyu, Kisii, and Kamba.7 What made electoral violence different in 2007 from past episodes was how pervasive and destructive the violence was, as all provinces but two were affected.8 Discontent with the election results stemmed from the idea that the election of Kibaki represented the perpetuation of the status quo and the survival of a 3 Michael Cowen and Karuti Kanyinga, The 1997 Elections in Kenya: The Politics of Communality and Locality. (Helsinki: Institute of Development Studies, 1998). 4 Mueller, “The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis.” 5 Mueller, “The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis,” 190. 6 Mueller “The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis,” 203. 7 Peter Kagwanja, “Courting Genocide: Populism, Ethno-Nationalism and the Informalization of Violence in Kenya’s 2008 Post-Election Crisis,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 27, no. 3 (July 2009): 378. 8 Government of Kenya, The Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence (CIPEV), 2008. 2 system in which some ethnic groups faced poverty, landlessness, and political disenfranchisement.9 Within a few weeks of the beginning of the crisis, an African Union-mandated mediation process, led by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, began. This team consisted of a Panel of Eminent African Personalities, including Graca Machel and President Mkapa of Tanzania, and benefitted from AU backing and UN support.10 Multilateral mediation was necessary, as both Kibaki and Odinga refused to negotiate with each other, the former because he did not want to relinquish power and the latter because he believed the election had been rigged.11 The purpose of this mediation was to put an end to the violence before it escalated further, to the level of civil war or genocide.12 Because the violence was understood to have originated from systematic inequalities that allowed certain ethnic groups to be marginalized politically and economically,13 Annan’s strategy for mediation was intentionally inclusive and transparent, representing interests from all sectors of Kenyan civil society.14 The Panel’s Road Map for Reform included putting an end to the violence and then proposing long- term solutions, such as increasing accountability, decreasing poverty, and enacting land 9 Elisabeth Lindenmayer and Josie Lianna Kaye, A Choice for Peace? The Story of the 41 Days of Mediation in Kenya (New York: Columbia University UN Studies Program, 2008), 7. 10 Lindenmayer and Kaye, A Choice for Peace?, 11-13. 11 Lindenmayer and Kaye, A Choice for Peace?, 7-10. 12 Lindenmayer and Kaye, A Choice for Peace?, 2. 13 Lindenmayer and Kaye, A Choice for Peace?, 6. 14 Lindenmayer and Kaye, A Choice for Peace?, 13. 3 reform.15 While the most urgent need was to stop the violence, the longer-term focus would be on addressing the institutional factors that caused the crisis in the first place. From the standpoint of international election observers, institutional shortcomings were central to creating the underlying conditions for the conflagration; institutional fixes, therefore, would be proposed not only to put an end to the violence, but also to address deep-seated institutional deficiencies like corruption and the distribution of resources. The International Republican Institute (IRI), which sent observers to Kenya for the 2007 election, laid out a list of recommendations to prevent this type of electoral violence from happening again.