BONYO'S BONE: Governors, but are they?

Tonight, I am picking a bone with County Governors. Leadership, we are told, is about delegation: hiring the best, then letting them do their job.

But watching our Governors before the Homa Bay Senator Moses Kajwang’-led County Public Accounts Committee, you’d think delegation is a foreign language.

These sessions unmask Governors—their unpreparedness and lack of touch in the running of the devolved units.

It reveals that while they may be big on convoys and attendant unjustified veneration and opulence, they are irresolute when it comes to auditing the billions of shillings they receive in budgets.

Here is a fact: we don’t expect a Governor to be an accountant, an engineer, and a human resource officer all in one. But when you insist on answering every technical audit query yourself and stumble through numbers you don’t understand, then Kenyans will judge you.

Such a grilling is expected to answer a simple question: have Kenyans found value for their money out of the billions of shillings sent to counties?

What Kenyans get instead is fumbling and Governors feebling before the committee. The Governors appear to interact with volumes of documents they show up with—thicker than Bibles—for the first time.

Dear Governors, delegation is not a weakness. It is a strength. You have chief officers, accountants, advisors—experts paid by the taxpayer. Let them answer. That’s why they exist. Allow them to respond. They are closer to the question touch points than you are.

They are able to offer feedback much better than your fumbling. They are coherent on the accounting numbers compared to your inscrutable presentations.

Governors, if you acknowledge the question and invite the experts to deliver the answer, you will not lose what you are entitled to. Currently, most of your answers are obscure and are an injustice to the taxpayers and the electorate. They make for screaming headlines and social media content rather than answers to the money trail.

Leave the technical aspects of these reports to the experts. They know better.