Being Commander-in-Chief is truly shit. Nobody trusts you. Everyone thinks your Cabinet is made of complete halfwits. Your friends are hanging around so that they can pick your pocket. Come to think of it, that's why your enemies are hanging around too. When you make any decision, it is second-guessed by assholes who didn't even bother to stand for public office even once in their poverty-stricken lives. Then there are the haters hating on your wife or children and who peddle the most vile stories about you and your family. When things go wrong which, let's face it happens every day, the idiots who call themselves the press hound your ass with asinine questions that even three-year olds know to be full of shit.
Uhuru Kenyatta is the President of the Republic of Kenya, Head of State and Government, and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces. And he looks miserable in the job. Sure, every now and then he gets to do fun stuff like attending music and drama festivals or visiting with students of top performing schools. (It is sad that these are the only things that seem to bring a smile to the President's face.) But for the most part, he is dour and cranky, especially when it comes to the touchy question of whether or not his government is delivering.
The past month has been spectacularly misery-inducing for the President. Kenyans keep getting bombed and murdered by unknown, faceless enemies and the Inspector-General of Police and the Director-General of National Intelligence seem incapable of stanching the flow of blood on our streets. Key departments keep letting him down; the State Law Office has handed him a hemlock-filled Anglo Leasing chalice from which he has been compelled to take a long, deep drought. Then there are the stats his Cabinet Secretaries keep bandying frantically about as they unconvincingly try to persuade us that "things will get better." A year and change into his reign and the President's government is reviled within and outside the ruling coalition and by a truly diverse cross-section of Kenyans. It makes you want to weep for the man.
What is beyond doubt is that despite his occasional crabbiness and persnickety reaction to bad news, Uhuru Kenyatta is still a delight to see when he is in full flow. If only he shed his nice-guy persona; it is time for half his Cabinet to start sending out their CVs. Some were the worst ever choices for the Ministries they were handed. Kaimenyi has fucked up the laptops-for-tots deal that his ass should be smarting from the bakoras he has suffered at the hands of the media and sundry other vested interests. No one believes Kandie when she promises that Kenya will always have the Big Five, especially when her promise comes after a wildlife mascot that has roamed free for forty-seven odd years gets butchered under the noses of the KWS. Who remembers the last time they saw or heard from Omamo at Defence, Mohammed at Industrialisation, Wario at Sports, Culture and the Arts, or Koskey at Agriculture without thinking that bright or not, these people are in the wrong institution at the wrong time and with the wrong skills set?
And the ones who are seen and heard are pretty adept at generating headlines that keep the President awake at night. Ole Lenku at the Interior and Ngilu at Lands are just the most obvious. But when you see and hear Kambi at Labour you wince in horror for the political accommodations President Kenyatta made in order to get his Cabinet approved. It is New Broom Time for the President; he needs to clean house. He not needs to send the political and administrative millstones around his neck packing, he has to cut down on the army of overpaid consultants who've sent his ship of state towards the political and administrative rocks. A year later and all he can show for it is pity is not the record Uhuru Kenyatta expected, is it Rais?
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