This week the Local Public Sector Alliance Sub-Saharan Africa Working Group, in partnership with the South African Research Chair in Multilevel Government at the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights, convened a Kenya–South Africa dialogue in Nairobi, Kenya and online, bringing together National Government, County Governments and Assemblies, civil society, research and policy institutes, academia, and development partners to reflect on Kenya’s 15 years of devolution alongside South Africa’s new White Paper on Local Government.
The dialogue was held under the leadership of the LPSA SSA Working Group Co-Chairs Judy Oduma, Prof. Jaap de Visser and Kah Walla, LPSA Working Group Coordinator Jacqueline Wairimu Muthura, and LPSA Executive Director Jamie Boex.
The event was a great success, with deep thanks to our speakers and partners, including Amb. Ali Abbas, Prof. Jaap de Visser Judy Oduma, Keziah Njeri, Dr. Henry Paul Gichana, Petronilla Mukaindo, and to IGRTC.
Five key takeaways from the room:
1. Enforcing national compliance without stifling local democracy requires protecting competitive local politics, merit-based administration, and citizen voice as the real safeguards of the devolution promise — a shared imperative for both Kenya and South Africa.
2. Strengthening individual accountability through rules-based supervision with real consequences, drawing on South Africa’s certificates of debt and Kenya’s Senate PAC and Auditor General findings, offers concrete pathways for both systems to close the enforcement gap.
3. Fiscal architecture remains the hardest task, and both systems offer partial fixes — including a staggered local government financial year, greater treasury independence, and reforms such as CRA’s model tariff and pricing law now being adopted by 10 Kenyan counties.
4. Insulating merit-based performance, professional management, and objective triggers for national intervention is the way to restore trust in local government on both sides.
5. A human rights-based approach reframes counties as duty-bearers fulfilling Article 43 socio-economic rights with residents as rights-holders, and courts are increasingly stepping in where oversight lags.
A full report on the event will follow in the coming weeks, along with the Zoom recording of the event.
