President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Cabinet secretaries made a raft
of appointments published in a special Monday issue of Kenya Gazette
which have been roundly condemned by young Kenyans as...
the worst form of insensitivity by a regime that already abandoned them the very day it took power.
the worst form of insensitivity by a regime that already abandoned them the very day it took power.
One critical observation Kenyans have made
of the calibre of officials the President believes can drive his
government’s development agenda is their advanced ages and the
privileged backgrounds they come from.
Many are scions
of the country’s independence era political and business elite classes.
Some, like Marsden Madoka, were already serving in government when the
President was barely 10 years old.
The list represents
the who’s who who pilfered the nation or straddled it in the years gone
by. Looking at the appointments closely, you realise many of the people
the president appointed did not need those jobs and can live quite
comfortably in terms of basic human needs.
This is not
baffling, but at stake is the departure from a well thought-out strategy
to streamline parastatals and make them wealth creators for our
country.
What then was the need for the much-hyped and
costly presidential parastatal reforms task force chaired by Abdikadir
Mohammed and Isaac Awuondo which the President formed only months after
taking office in 2013? Are these recycled oldies the products of the
task force’s 15 key recommendations?
Where is Mwongozo,
the policy document on the code of governance for state corporations?
Why is the President only talking reforms without walking the talk?
To
understand the President’s actions now is to pay attention to the
political forces shaping President Uhuru’s regime half way to another
electoral contest.
Unlike other presidential
opponents, Uhuru will approach 2017 as an incumbent on whose shoulders
the manifest failures of the Jubilee regime, numerous and deadly, will
be judged.
Critically, the President has abandoned
reforms and is already in an early campaign mode. This is
understandable; the Jubilee regime badly needs a campaign agenda to
cling to having terribly failed to achieve a single item in the merged
campaign manifestoes of the URP and TNA.
HIGHLY INADEQUATE
Propaganda
and public relations seem not to work, or are highly inadequate. This
new state of affairs is extremely bad for the country.
First,
President Uhuru still needs to achieve something for the country,
however little and late. Those who voted for him and those who didn’t
still expect to see a change in their lives brought about by the Jubilee
regime, and the reforms of parastatals were among the fundamental
initiatives to bring about transformative social change to our people.
Parastatals
are key to transforming people’s livelihoods. They represent critical
machinery in the development prospects of a country.
Many
are meant to create wealth. The initial thinking of the Jubilee regime —
now clearly abandoned — was to have efficient, lean and effective
entities with highly skilled workforces.
The
Abdikadir-Awuondo task force observed as much. Yet, the President’s
recent recovery of people the world had forgotten long ago and
mainstreaming them in his ‘late’ digital regime is a big indictment on
the duo.
Second, a lot of taxpayers money and human
capital went into rethinking the new parastatals model. The waste is the
worst form of abuse of power. It is corruption.
One
wonders why the President did not just telephone retired Presidents
Daniel Arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki and other members of the royal families
of Kenya for names.
Third, the new appointments reveal the egregious lengths President Uhuru can go to pacify communities. Why? 2017, of course.
Finally
the President has completely ignored county governments. This is not
surprising at all as the default thinking of the Jubilee regime is to
act as if Kenya is still a centralised nation.
The writer is Suna East MP
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