NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 19 – The Nairobi County Government says it is in the final stages of creating new six administrative units (boroughs) to bolster service delivery.
Nairobi City County Chief Officer in charge of boroughs and Sub County Administration Lydia Mathia in an interview with Capital FM News asserted that the new model will give Nairobi residents an opportunity to exploit the full promise of devolution with the cascading of critical functions from City Hall to the grass root level.
“We are devolving in order to actualize devolution. The idea about devolution was that the services needed by Kenyans are provided in as close proximity as possible. Because of the difficulty of having enough officers and working spaces, it is almost as though devolution never happened,” she said.
Mathia added that devolution stopped at the county levels whereas there is still a critical aspect of cascading doon the services to the lowest level at the village level to make them within the reach of people.
“It was just the national government devolving into 47 counties. But the 47 counties did not devolve down to the wards, so that is what we are trying to do. The simplest way to think about boroughs is to imagine city hall stepping a little downwards,” she added.
The boroughs which are fragmented district administrative units will regroup the 17 sub counties in Nairobi based on the population that each carry and will have a representative from City Hall as its head.
Each borough will have between three to four sub counties.
City all adds that it is reviewing services that it will onboard to the burrow system, leaving City Hall to be primarily a command center where directions are passed from, a complete departure form the current system.
In May last year, Nairobi governor Johnson Sakaja while appearing before senate devolution committee disclosed the plan to set up the boroughs as a way of decentralizing services.
“The county is in the process of establishing five number administrative boroughs to bring services closer to the people,” said Sakaja at the time.
