Opinion: Dwindling Fortunes of Siaya County

Siaya County has earned the dubious distinction of being among those that have fiercely and fervently defended their coveted positions at the bottom. Siaya County Balanced Scorecard is a pale reflection of the image and perception of the region and Luo community as the citadel of excellence.

I would aptly describe this evident lackluster as ‘perpetual dwellers of the bottom strata.’ Let’s critically watch the processes as they unfold. The sad state of affairs in Siaya County has attracted a lot of commentaries by insiders and outsiders in equal measure. One of the tenets of justice is that one must ‘approach justice with clean hands.’ The jury is still out there as to whether Raila’s hands are clean in relation to the rampant mismanagement, looting and malfeasance that have defined Siaya county and the other Luo Nyanza counties in the last twelve years. Even if the claims against Raila are not true, they’re certainly not far-fetched. These are the reasons. Over the years, the Luo community has been at the forefront in the fight against corruption, bad governance and all manner of vices that have denied citizens full enjoyment of the services underwritten by their taxes. The community has been a thorn in the flesh of successive regimes in Kenya, starting with that of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta through to Moi’s, Kibaki’s, Uhuru’s and until the Broad based government, Ruto’s.

At independence, Nyanza was a flourishing region with high yielding economic activities and academic performance. All that was sabotaged by bad government policies in a bid to send the community to the peripheries of the state and development. President Kenyatta must have read the colonial government’s confidential reports on the Luo as a ‘hugely intelligent and progressive people’, and concluded that in order to cut them to size, they needed to be suffocated economically so that their social transformation could be curtailed.

Raila himself has been very consistent in fighting bad regimes to the extent that his name is indelibly and inextricably intertwined with Kenya’s fight for good governance and second liberation. All the current Luo Nyanza governors were elected on the tickets of the Orange Democratic (ODM) Party, which is led by Raila. Pundits have argued that all the Luo Nyanza Governors were selected into office. Raila’s name keeps cropping up, rightly or wrongly, as the ‘invisible hand’ in the ODM party selection process. Raila may or may not have been party to the flawed nomination processes in his party, but one thing is obvious: he knew about them.

Siaya County is yearning for development. Most economic sectors have either collapsed, or are in their death beds. There’re marauding educated youth who are not gainfully employed in Siaya. In their hopelessness, the youth become ready fodder for political manipulation. They are easily turned into goons and hired by Orengo’s regime to wreck havoc against opponents. They boo perceived opponents in political gatherings and funerals in an attempt to deny them an opportunity to connect with the electorate. The youth have abandoned the land and entrepreneurship in a bid to get quick handouts from politicians. In this respect, the local politicians unwittingly perpetrate the scheme to deepen the impoverishment of Siaya County.

With all these overt and covert discriminatory schemes against the Luo, one would expect that once the country entered into the dispensation of devolved units with constitutionally mandated funding, governor Rasanga and now Orengo would employ the most prudent management approaches to lift thousands of Siaya Residents out of the debilitating poverty that they have been consigned to by discriminatory government policies.

Alas, the Siaya county is lagging behind in literally every aspect of development. What about the spectacle of the governor Orengo and his cronies engaging in buying and building sprees way above their known incomes? We know the official salaries of governors and all those who work at Siaya county. We also know what they own and how large they now live. We can safely conclude that their new-found lifestyles are way above their known sources of income. Therefore, we can safely speculate that the opulent lifestyles we see have some correlation with the dwindling performance of Siaya county whose resources they’re supposed to hold in trust for citizens.

The oversight responsibility rests on the citizens through the Members of County Assembly (MCAs). Some of the MCAs do business with the counties whose executives they’re supposed to oversight. The oversight role is therefore, grossly undermined as the MCAs become beholden to the executives, and some of the sub-optimal deliveries which are subjects of investigations have actually been done by the very MCAs that are supposed to investigate them. So, the MCAs lack the wherewithal to question misdeeds of which they are perpetrators. Most of the MCAs were elected and nominated on Raila’s ODM party. The party cannot, therefore, escape blame whenever there’s poor performance of the counties where its members are the majority. Orengo has demonstrated unbelievable impunity in dealing with the Senate or government’s investigative agencies especially EACC.

Charity begins at home. Raila has a responsibility and duty to reign-in on Governor Orengo and stop defending his malfeasance. Siaya County urgently requires a lakefront development plan which would entail for example, pooling together resources to put up cold rooms to preserve fish so that middlemen do not take advantage of desperate fishermen and buy fish from them at a fraction of their value. The county could also develop a plan for irrigating the lake region including Yala Swamp to invigorate food production, agro-based processing and other value addition activities to boost the region’s income levels.

ODM party must ensure free and fair elections so that the electorate can put in office men and women of their choice to be in charge of stewardship of their resources. When that happens, then the electorate will have the political muscle and legitimacy to hold their leaders to account. Whenever the party imposes candidates on the electorate, impunity is planted as the leaders become answerable to those who selected them, and not the electorate. For as long as the selection continues in ODM party, nobody will take seriously Raila’s preaching on corruption and justice. All eyes are on Raila and ODM party. Until then, Raila’s preachings on corruption are like the proverbial playing of the guitar to a goat.

Thank you.

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