Losing their damn minds, they are.

Members - senior members - of the United Republican Party are losing their minds. Now, everyone and his blind cat knows that the URP is really a North Rift bandwagon with a few stragglers who couldn't build a bandwagon of their own. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that many senior members of the URP are bitterly reminiscing at the Siberian winter they are experiencing now that few of their champions are Cabinet Secretaries or Principal Secretaries, a fact that is hitting home hard after almost forty years, from the days Daniel Moi was Vice-President to the final days of Baba Jimmi's faux kleptocracy.

 

So now there are gentlemen in the URP camp who are going slowly out of their minds that they cannot get their hands on the latest political, economic or public-procurement-related scuttlebutt. They have tried several tactics; none has come within a hair's breadth of loosening the perceived Mt Kenya Mafia tight-fisted grip on the key levers of money, power and political influence. They have now lit on the idea of amending the Constitution in order to permit the President to appoint sitting Members of Parliament to his Cabinet.

 

Kenyans will vehemently disagree on the benefits of the constitutional arrangement we have today; few will challenge the move towards more technocratic Cabinets. For sure, Kenya's inaugural Cabinet under the Constitution has been spectacularly inept; that does not mean that the idea behind it is flawed, only its execution. If the good folks of the North Rift want to re-write the past, they had best avoid that chap that denied the link between forests and precipitation!

 

None is arguing that Parliament does not have men or women qualified to run large and complex government ministries; but Kenyans consciously chose a quasi-presidential system in which the three branches are separate. The Executive's members were no longer members of the Legislature and vice versa. parliament had fought for and won autonomy; the price was the separation of parliament and the Executive. The pay out was to be experienced by Kenyans first, not the ruling classes alone.

 

Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto should admit that they botched it with some of their choices for the Cabinet. Some of their choices have caused nothing but headaches, and because few of them have true political gifts to deploy in the face of disgruntlement, the side perceived to be getting the better end of the deal is viewed with suspicion, envy and malice. TNA is seen as coming out ahead of URP at every turn; URP wants to even the odds by getting some of is stalwart members on Parliament to bring back a bit of the stardust from the KANU kleptocracy to the National Executive. Theirs will be a Sisyphean task. This blogger does not wish them luck. Neither should you.