Something has to give.

I have read the self-serving justifications by Senator Kipchumba Murkomen over the problems with the County Governments (Amendment) Act, 2014, which creates the County Development Boards with senators as the chairpersons and governors as secretaries to the Boards. He unpersuasively argues that senators are the umbilical cord linking the national and county governments; that senators need useful information to facilitate their county oversight role; and that because senators do not manage any fund they are therefore, likely to be neutral. Governors, of course, do not have a credible intellectual argument to be made against the senators' power grab at the county level; they will go to court and they will likely lose their deposits.

Mr Murkomen and his colleagues, however, are wrong. It is true that devolved government has advanced in fits and starts. Mistakes have been made; some are grave but none is grave enough to require the presence of senators at the county level micromanaging the development agenda and generally being pains in the ass. There is a reason we have a Parliament; it is meant to play its oversight role in relation to the National Government; county governments have county assemblies and if the ex-councillors masquerading as members of county assemblies are incapable of performing their duties, it is the responsibility of the voters to make a change, either through recall elections or at the next general elections. The people at the grassroots sent their senator to Nairobi and chose someone else to keep governors on their toes at the county. It is time Mr Murkomen and his colleagues started playing their proper role in relation to the national government: sleep.

The Senate's grasp exceeds its reach. This power grab is informed by a peculiarly Kenyan understanding of development, being the spending of public monies for white elephants of little utility to the people but lucre for the spenders and their cronies. There is no reason why senators should provide input on the development agenda of a county executive; that is a partnership between the county executive and the county assembly. The former proposes; if the latter approves, the former can then execute. It is how a government works. Oversight is the responsibility of the one that executes. If the county government collectively decides to be profligate, the national government can step in. Again, it is the role of the National Executive to propose a course of action, the Senate to approve and the National executive to execute.

The argument that problems will be forestalled does not wash. That is why we have national economic blue prints and why the Controller of Budget's office was constitionalised. If Mr Murkomen and his colleagues had the equivalent of the Congressional Research Service, and which was not staffed by their village-mates without an ounce of grey matter in the matters that matter, and which received the resources required to function effectively, the Senate would perform its national oversight role more effectively and it would protect devolution more credibly than by these harebrained schemes cooked up by the bored and the intellectually perfidious. But instead of making the Senate a credible legislative chamber capable of erudite thinking and superior debate, it has become a venue for the venal, the lazy and the malicious whose principle objective, it seems, is t amass power just like every other power-mad institution in Kenya.

The case for the continued existence of the Senate can still be made. The National Executive and the supine National Assembly are determined to retain centralised power and its structures; they have no interest in the devolution of power or resources. It is in the interest of the Senate to ensure the complete devolution of power and resources to the counties, to empower governors to govern effectively, to inculcate a culture of selflessness in county assemblies while overseeing the work of the county executives and generally to ensure that the National Government does what it is meant to do: collect taxes; protect the people; and generally stay out of the way of progress. But senators keep making the case for the dissolution of the Senate and the return to centralised government by their hostility to governors who enjoy power and prestige in their counties. One way or the other, something has to give.