Somehow, Uhuru is still getting out of bed every day

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Posted  Saturday, April 5   2014 at  14:05

In Summary

• It is rare for a president to be foiled in getting his heart’s desire by so many problems in his first year. Kenyatta can take the challenges as a baptism into the presidential church, and draw strength from them, or despair.

I don’t envy Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta. Rarely has a president who took power in an election had to deal with so much.

Barely had he and his deputy William Ruto been sworn in, than they both had again to focus their political and diplomatic energies on dealing with the charges facing them at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

But that wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if he also didn’t have to deal with implementing a Constitution, passed in 2010, but whose key elements came into effect with the new government. The Kenya 2010 Constitution probably undertook the most radical remake of government ever tried legally in Africa in 50 years.

One of its most promising and potentially dangerous aspects was the devolution of power to 47 counties led by governors, most of whom set themselves up as small emperors.

The counties were popular because they finally took some of the national groceries to marginalised parts of Kenya, but some are becoming the country’s most scary horror movies.

A few counties, like Machakos, have taken giant leaps forward. But in the majority of counties, money-hungry local legislators and governors are eating the country from under Kenyatta’s feet.

This is the same Kenyatta who, just five months into his presidency, had to deal with the worst terrorist attack in Kenya since the bombing of the US embassy in 1998, when Al Shabaab militants attacked Westgate Mall, killing nearly 70 people and wounding hundreds.

All that gave corrupt networks and vested interests that were lying low, afraid to take on a newly elected president in his honeymoon period, courage. They started to regroup.

The result is that Kenyatta has seen the crown jewel of his campaign, the laptops for schools programme, run aground in Kenya’s Byzantine contract wars.

Kenyatta was obviously aware that he had no more than a year to lock in his pet projects before what popular cartoonist Gado likes to depict as a cabal of hyenas, vultures and other predatory animals, ran him off the road.

He therefore pushed hard to initiate several mega regional projects with Uganda and Rwanda in the informal group that was controversially dubbed the “Coalition of the Willing” (CoW). However, the elder statesman of CoW, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, soon got distracted by schemes to secure a seventh term for himself in the elections of 2016

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Then, both Kenyatta and Museveni got blindsided when a critical actor in their regional strategies, South Sudan, descended into the hell of ethnic war in December following a violent falling out in the ruling SPLM.

At home, another plank of Kenyatta’s plan, the standard gauge railway, got derailed by allegations of corruption. And now terrorism and political violence are spiralling in the Mombasa region, dealing a blow to tourism.

It is rare for a president to be foiled in getting his heart’s desire by so many problems in his first year. Kenyatta can take the challenges as a baptism into the presidential church, and draw strength from them, or despair.

For now, it is a good sign that he still has the motivation to get out of bed every morning, and go to the office.