Garissa’s Sh58.6 billion question: has devolution delivered for the North?

GARISSA — Add up a decade of equitable-share releases, conditional grants and the promises printed in successive County Integrated Development Plans, and a figure in the region of KSh 58.6 billion hangs over Garissa like weather. The question RTG has been asking in markets and on 90.4 is simple: what did it buy?

There are answers that fit on a brochure — hospitals expanded, a stadium promised, bursaries issued, boreholes drilled. There are answers that fit on a windscreen: corridors that still chew tyres, dispensaries that still miss drugs by Thursday, and streetlights that work for a launch and then do not.

Devolution was sold to the North as the end of Nairobi’s distance. Distance, it turns out, can be rebuilt inside a county headquarters. Procurement, ghost works and the quiet transfer of projects from one financial year to the next have become as familiar as drought.

This is not an argument against devolution. It is an argument for a public that can read a budget. RTG Digital will keep putting invoices next to inaugurations, because a ribbon is not an audit.