Jacob Luseno’s 1983 song, Makuru, painted a vivid picture of the village elder as an agent of the State.

Village elders had “Pentecostal vision” and could spot and seize hidden chickens as part of collection of numerous government levies. The village elder has always known where the chickens are hiding. He was the fingers on the long arm of government — the man who knew which homestead had what, who had paid, who had not, and whose chicken needed confiscating.

Last week, President William Ruto announced that village elders would receive a Sh3,000 monthly allowance. The distance between Luseno’s song and Ruto’s elders is only a few decades, but it contains a remarkable story about the Kenyan State.

The monthly allowance is recognition of the service the more than 100,000 village elders in the country render. The question it raises is much larger than the annual Sh3.6 billion involved.

Kenya has had a long, unresolved dance with the provincial administration. In that struggle, the village elder has always continued to occupy an ambiguous space in the country’s political matrix. He is at once a creature of the community and an agent of the State — a bearer of local knowledge and an instrument of official authority; a traditional figure repeatedly recruited into the machinery of modern government.

The colonial State figured out early that it could not govern through European officials. It therefore used layers of African intermediaries — chiefs, headmen, elders and other local authorities became the eyes, ears and hands of an administration whose authority needed to scratch places the state could not physically reach.

Devolution

After independence, the chief was one of the most recognisable faces of the State, reporting upwards to the district commissioner and on to the provincial commissioner. Information flowed up, and authority flowed downwards.

The great constitutional promise of 2010 was to change the direction of the relationship between the government and the citizen. Devolution sought to make government more accessible, participatory and accountable to citizens, with the county serving as the primary political and administrative space between the national government and the citizen.

Yet, the national government surrendered functions to counties while retaining a formidable administrative apparatus of its own. The old provincial administration was jettisoned from the Constitution but its institutional instinct survives to date. The provincial commissioner is now regional commissioner. Districts are now called sub-counties. County commissioners and their deputies, as well as chiefs and their assistants now have a dedicated 1,860-strong National Government Administration Police Unit supporting them.

Under the County Governments Act, the village is a unit of devolved government. The village council is chaired by the village administrator and includes village elders. Their functions include coordinating community participation in governance, monitoring the implementation of government policies and advising ward and sub-county administrators.

The village elder is not simply an informal community notable. The office sits within the architecture of county government, close to the point at which devolved government meets the citizen.

The village elders immortalised in Luseno’s song as petty collectors of government dues are today elected by their communities, often through queue voting, but could now become paid representatives of the state.

Village elders perform work that governments at every level routinely depend on but rarely value. They know their communities in ways no bureaucratic database can replicate. They can identify emerging disputes, vulnerable households, local grievances and the gap between government announcements and the reality on the ground. For this, they deserve to be paid.

A government that expects local actors to mobilise communities, facilitate security, transmit information and support public programmes should not expect them to work for free. Yet the money is coming from the national government.

National government

When an elder chosen by the people is paid by the State, whom does the elder ultimately represent? If they answer the county government, then the national government would be financing a devolved function. If they answer to the national government, then Kenya may be witnessing the creation of a parallel administrative relationship reaching directly from State House into the village.

A network of more than 100,000 elders is a significant political constituency, and the timing of the decision to pay them allowances is noteworthy. Kenya is already entering the long political shadow of 2027. A national programme that puts money directly into the hands of more than 100,000 locally influential people will inevitably acquire political meaning, however benign the original intention might have been.

Luseno’s elder represented the petty coercion of the State. Ruto’s elder could represent something more sophisticated. The chicken is no longer being taken but the allowance is being delivered. The real test is whether the elder becomes a bridge between citizens and government or an extension of government into the community.

A democratic village elder should be able to tell government what the people are saying.

An administrative village elder tells the people what government wants them to hear.

Did Kenya abolish provincial administration in 2010 — or merely teach it some new constitutional manners?

A devolved system needs the former.

The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; kwamchetsi@email.com