When the Governors convened the Devolution Conference in Kirinyaga County, the official theme was “Remaining Accountable.” Somewhere between the speeches, the exhibitions, and the quiet side meetings, that theme quietly mutated into something far more honest: “Remaining Protected.” The working agenda, though unwritten, was clear to anyone paying attention:
- How to eat without being caught
- The lie to tell when caught
- How to survive the cheating
Agenda One: How to Eat Without Being Caught
Actions, as always, spoke louder than the carefully worded communiqués. In a symbolic gesture of “preparedness,” the host county distributed 100,000 male condoms and, for balance, 50,000 female ones. Priorities had been set. With that delicate matter out of the way, delegates turned to the serious business of optics.
The exhibitions told their own story.
Narok County
Narok County, perhaps sensing a shortage of tangible achievements, decided that geography is a flexible concept. If one Narok could not deliver, another would. So they crossed into Mau Narok in Nakuru County, sourced beans and peas, polished them to a gleam, and arranged them artfully—strategic potatoes here, a bushel of barley there. The display was convincing. It was also fiction. Meanwhile, back home, tourists heading to the Maasai Mara still faced a more urgent reality: the absence of basic sanitation. When nature called, one either improvised with a bottle or gambled with wildlife. But at the conference, the beans shone.
Embu County
Embu County took a more sophisticated route: the power of imagery. Their booth displayed crisp, well-composed photographs of county officials in session—governance as it should look. The images were clean, orderly, and reassuring. Missing, of course, were the less photogenic realities: the long court battles, the constant legal firefighting. And then there was the small detail they overlooked—those “county offices” captured so proudly were not even in Embu. They were at Roasters Inn in Nairobi, a full 100 kilometres away. Accountability, it seems, travels.
Kisumu County
Kisumu County opted for endurance theatre. Four men sat in their booth, stone-faced, anchored to their stools like sentries. They guarded a life-size banner of Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o’s pre-election manifesto, a document that now read less like a promise and more like an exhibit. The men hardly moved, perhaps out of duty, perhaps out of resignation. The tent was quiet—lonely, even. It is not easy to stand beside a symbol of unmet expectations, especially in a county where even refurbished solutions, like the water hyacinth dredger, move with the urgency of a kitchen spoon.
Homa Bay
Then there was Homa Bay County, which chose a different kind of honesty: absence. Their booth stood empty. No attendants, no displays, no pretence. Whoever had been assigned to man it had wisely disappeared. After all, who volunteers to represent a county where MCAs publicly brawl with their Assembly Speaker? In a conference full of carefully constructed illusions, Homa Bay’s emptiness was almost refreshing. No Potemkin village. No borrowed shine. Just silence.
In the end, the conference achieved what it set out to do—just not what it claimed. Beneath the banners of accountability, a more candid lesson unfolded: governance, in practice, is often less about service and more about survival. And in that quiet shift from “accountable” to “protected,” the truth of devolution revealed itself—not in speeches, but in the spaces between them
