Let them eat grass.

There is a special group of people for whom Divine Intervention is the only way that their Sisyphean tasks will be eased. Every time providence provides them with the opportunity to excel at the mundane, their focus fails them and enfeebles their capacity to decide correctly - or properly. When faced with a fork in the road, they will not choose one path or the other, but they will attempt to walk both. Worse, they might choose not to do anything at all, rendered impotent by the weight of expectations about their choices.

The Cabinet Secretary for...is it East African Affairs, Commerce and Tourism, or Environment, Water and Natural Resources?...one of the two has larked onto one of the stupidest decisions ever made public by a public officer in the life of the Jubilee administration. Perhaps more stupid than the order to "detain vehicles with tinted windows." (We will ignore the tortured grammar for now.) Definitely more stupid than the declaration by a lowly governor that he had "intelligence" about the chaos a political rally would wreak in his county. One of the two has decided to broach the idea of spending scarce public resources to buy grass for wildlife "because of the drought."

I have alluded several times before that I hold the professional political classes in very low esteem. And when members of those classes were members of the cabinet, I reviled them so much the bile was always up. I did not think that even with their poor public speaking skills and their relatively naive view of the public service that the new Cabinet's members would make statements and act like the aforementioned revolting political classes' members of the Cabinet. Yet here we are; in Turkana, Josephat Nanok is trying to find a way of guaranteeing better beef prices for farmers in his county in the midst of the same harsh drought with nary a cent being sent to Turkana in the name of fattening up the cows. But we are going to find no doubt hundreds of millions of shillings to buy grass - which ideally should go to the beef and dairy farmers - for wild animals? Are you fucking kidding me?

Kenyan tourism, it seems, is supported by Kenyan wildlife. Kenyan wildlife is under threat from drought. To restore Kenyan tourism we must protect Kenyan wildlife. To protect Kenyan wildlife, we shall allocate money from our disaster management fund, if we have one, to providing food for wildlife. Somebody else can worry about livestock and humans; in any case, cows, goats, sheep, camels and 99% of the human population don't really contribute much to tourism. If the two cannot see the message for what it is then it is time to congratulate them for becoming the one thing Kenyans thought they had banished from the Cabinet: a virus that has afflicted the National Executive and will eventually kill the body politic.

Priorities continue to flummox the National Executive. This new one is a humdinger. News has been tightly controlled but the starvation deaths in Kenya's forgotten bits are becoming harder and harder to hide, even in the midst of a raging war in Lamu and Tana River counties. For senior members of the government to propose feeding animals and not people is the height of cruelty. And if the proposal was actually made by either of the two, it would have been made by a woman, the universal symbol of compassion. If women leaders wish to be seen to be the equal of men, then this monstrous suggestion is a very good step in that direction.