A city as far as we know is about opportunities, jobs, livelihoods at least in its narrowest sense. People come to cities with the hope that they can better their circumstances. Over the years the management of public affairs has been a centralised command driven affair with everything proceeding from the center.

There has thus been a situation where links between citizens and service providers is least accountable; a situation where specific and meas

measurable improvements in the quality and coverage of basic services to the poor cannot be measured and the goal of local authority’s fulfilling their ultimate responsibility of providing the much needed services to its people is hardly ever realised.

One would have expected Mombasa City Council for example to form the basis of the link between central government and the people in the various localities. The council ought to provide a forum for widening public participation and involvement in affairs of the nation and also provide the forum for the democratic practices and leadership at the grassroots level. This though is a pipe dream for the council long went to slumber. The committees system through which it operates has been abused beyond measure, each supervising a department, or a programme area or a specialised function accounts to nobody. The full council whose decisions take the form of council resolutions is known for acting at the behest of either the mayor or the minister for local authorities and the decay runs through the veins of the entire system.

Recently the government has expressed its commitment to transform the local authorities by spearheading the development of policies which support and contribute to the long term reduction of poverty in Kenya, improvement of the quality and coverage of essential basic services provided to the poor through the promotion of the participation of citizens in planning and delivering services.

Decentralisation, Review of Local Government Act, Local government reforms - KLGRP, increasing citizen involvement in planning, planning for poverty alleviation,

constitutional review have therefore earned a very important place in the discourse of change in the local governance sector. LASDAP, which is a rolling participatory planning process that links locally developed plans with local authority budgets, resulted from this deep debate. Local Authority Transfer Funds, LA revenues and other resources finance LASDAPs and the focus of LASDAP is on direct service delivery to citizens, particularly the poor (PRSP). LASDAP involves a series of community consultative meetings to identify and prioritise needs based on known resources.

The LASDAP process allows LAs to plan the use of their resources, (local resources as well as LATF) in consultation with their citizens. The prioritized activities and projects are implemented through the LAs annual budget. The LASDAP must therefore be prepared using a participatory process that involves local citizens and should have a poverty focus in line with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) with priority areas in health, education, infrastructure and upgrading of informal settlements.

The Central government set up the devolution program in 1999 through which it has been sharing the national revenue with the local authorities through the Local Authority Transfer Fund (LATF). The funds are shared amongst the 174 Local Authorities annually in line with the PRSP and the National Strategy on Employment and Wealth Creation policies.

The primary purpose of the Local Authorities Transfer Fund (LATF) is to enable local Authorities (LAs) to improve and extend service delivery to citizens. To assist in this, all LAs are required to develop a Local Authority Service Delivery Action Plan (LASDAP), setting out the Authority’s priorities for improving local services. Preparation of LASDAP is one of the five criteria of the LATF Performance component as contained in Legal Notice 142 dated 10th September 1999, legal Notice 83 dated 25th May 2001 and Gazette Notice 3505 dated 25th May 2001, Gazette Notice No.2539 dated 19th April 2002 and Gazette Notice No.2533 dated 14th April 2003.

All the priority projects identified during the participatory process and as agreed by stakeholders must be documented. Where several community consultation meetings are held, say at ward level, a consensus meeting must be held at a central place with representatives of various wards to agree on the final entries and priorities for inclusion. Activities and projects prepared through the LASDAP processes may require recurrent as well as capital expenditure. However, only additional recurrent expenditures required to deliver new, extended and improved services should be included. Staff for services should normally be from the existing personnel of the LA.

The types of stakeholder groups and organization invited to the consultative meeting should include Business organizations (Chamber of commerce, trade associations, market committees associations of jua kali, cooperatives); Residents associations of jua kali/hawkers, cooperatives; Women’s and youth organizations and groups; Self-help groups and groups organized around water, security etc; Religious groups (churches, Muslim organizations etc; Educational and health care organizations; Organizations of professionals; NGOs operating with the LA area.

Four years after the LATF process was adopted much water has passed under the bridge and with it one theatre of absurdity after another. So it came to pass that LATF was just another distortion on which we loaded a lot of unintended baggage; we even misconstrued the quality and quantity of the baggage. That is why the exaggerated expectations from LATF cannot be found on any map. Most LAs saw this money as money with which they could pay salaries, footloose money with which they could travel to seminars and divide amongst councilors for personal aggrandisement.

LATF was thus implemented on the facile assumption that the government knows what is best for the people that is why it came as water and went like wind; the loaf of bread was even smaller than half. Just some tinkering business, a very much milk and water affair! And our councils and their capacity or lack of it only worsened the situation. The case in Mombasa should be the worst to be exact. Nobody knows how the LA identified the poor if they did at all. The level of commitment to listening to communities was most dismal as councillors felt communities were there to agree with their views. The meetings were disorganised, not publicised, rigid and were managed very dictatorially. The council did not listen to the people, some councillors held ward consultations in private members clubs.

It is upon this background that we in the civil society felt we must intervene and legitimately so to increase the chances of being listened to, to strengthen the linkages. That we must play a more meaningful role in monitoring expenditure and share with the authority experiences from other parts of the world.

This intervention was not based on mere words. It is part of an ongoing support secured from DFID to be availed to Mombasa Council to finance projects of direct practical benefit to the poor. This is so that we can increase experience of participatory planning and give incentive to LA’s for pro-poor expenditure as a pilot for future poverty reduction grants. We expect the LA to identify "Poverty Action Projects" with support from PRAs and these must target vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. The LA is required to establish a monitoring group, which includes civil society representatives.

In order to be more effective the Coast NGO Forum decided to take a more proactive role in the LASDAP process to contribute to/ influence LA planning process. We encouraged other actors to identify community needs, problems, solutions, beneficiaries, to consult together, build organisations to assist in building capacity in local communities to enable them to participate. This is with a view to establish linkages between communities and government. We have always as a sector analysed policies and their implementation to suggest improvement. We feel we should assist government to get the most out of limited resources and generally represent voices that are often not heard. We stand to educate the communities so they can come up with proposals. However from our brief engagement the council of Mombasa does not listen to community organisations neither does it respond to their suggestions. But it receives the funds to implement but performs very little.

The forum therefore mandated a committee to spearhead work around LASDAP on a more long-term basis. Our aim is to expose the flaws in this process over and above engaging with CBOs and NGOs to strengthen the capacity of poor groups to negotiate with local government. We aim to launch a lobby group in respect of this policy to ensure that the council delivers the services most needed. We hope that this committee will contribute to the fight against corruption in the council.

We shall also lobby for Kenyans to go full length for devolution of power to make meaning of citizen participation in local governance. That is why we feel obliged to fight the antipathy towards constitutional reforms of the kind that can bring real devolution at the Bomas talks.