The Impeachment Albatross

To remove a Cabinet Secretary from office, the procedure  in Article 152 applies. We are all more than familiar with the procedure for removing a Governor from office. (We are also more than familiar with what it takes for a Governor to cling on past all logic to his office; the phrase "come hell or high water" is strangely apposite.) That, at least, is the technical aspect of the removal of a Cabinet Secretary or a Governor.

 

The Kenyan politician, however, doesn't care two figs for the technical aspects of an impeachment. Indeed, if he could skip the whole "due process" bit of an impeachment, all he would need would be "like-minded colleagues", a funeral speech or two, and, Hey Presto!, that Cabinet Secretary or Governor would be packing their bags and heading back to whatever private sinecure they had crawled out of in the first place.

 

This blogger knows precious little about why the Members of the County Assembly of Embu are determined to bury a hatchet in their Governor's back. What is apparent from the media sensationalisation of his repeated impeachments is that the Embu MCAs really, really want Martin Nyagah Wambora gone, and that he is just as equally stubbornly determined to hang on to his office chair. In Embu, it seems, only an Act of God will get Governor Wambora to relinquish his seat or, quite unlikely though, his tormentors to focus their animus on someone else. Close to home, this blogger remains blissfully ignorant of why suddenly the Cabinet Secretary for Devolution and Planning has drawn the bilious attention of Mithika Linturi. (Ignorance is bliss when you know nothing of the secrets of scary people.)

 

Mr Linturi, at the best of times, is not the most articulate Murume and in explaining himself with the Impeach Waiguru agenda, it takes several reads of the transcript to get the gist of things. Sadly, his explanations and justifications are not worth a bucket of warm piss. But if Ms Waiguru has the likes of Kithure Kindiki fighting in her corner, she should be very worried; there are few famous lawyers as bad at their jobs as the Senate Majority Leader. Mr Kindiki has distinguished himself in an institution where distinction is reserved for the most intemperate and reckless with his intemperance and recklessness.

 

We keep bandying about impeachment as if it is a reasonable weapon in political or administrative combat. The MCAs plotting the impeachments of their "unco-operative" governors ignore the very real costs of the impeachments; the millions of shillings in public funds that will be spent prosecuting the impeachments are funds that could be spent on building more early childhood education centres or hiring early childhood development teachers. Then there is the political cost.

 

We unanimously agreed that regardless of the flaws in the draft Constitution during the Referendum Campaign, we all wanted devolution to work. We reviled the Big Brother nannying of the central government and the pathological corruption of local government. County government was the magic bullet to better local services and improved quality of life. But the dysfunction inherited from the poisoned atmosphere in Nairobi threatens to turn county governments into evil twins of the government in Nairobi. If that happens, the shame we feel now will be visited on our children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.