Forget reforms, President already in campaign mode

President Uhuru Kenyatta with Marsden Madoka during the 2014 Taxpayers Week Awards at KICC on October 21, 2014. FILE PHOTO | DIANA NGILA |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• Parastatal list has names of people who stole from the country years ago.

By JUNET MOHAMMED
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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.

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