Those public service mandarins in the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit who are yet to familiarise themselves with the business of strategic communication have somehow managed to comfortably ensconce themselves in the traditions of the old-school civil service. They are the astute observers of the black letter and the odious spirit of the Official Secrets Act. It is entirely possible that they know every single line in that piece of legislation - and the ways and means that someone could stray even a micrometre over that line.
Those fine men - who must also have read keenly the Supreme Court Opinion on the Two-thirds Gender Rule - declared themselves to be netizens, citizens of the digital Internet Age. When they were Jubilee aparatchiks, they did everything in their power to peddle the #TeamDigital badge against their opponents that it has virtually become the government's brand. Their reach, however, is much shorter than their grasp: #TeamDigital is none but a smooth slogan that hides an awful truth. If there is a modern government of recent vintage that has managed to resurrect every skeleton from our blood-soaked past, it is the one that had the most dynamic vision for the nation in a generation.
The realities of governing as opposed to permanently campaigning are slowly permeating the minds of the Jubilee government. This realisation has been very distressing. It is difficult to govern when one does not have an intellectual or legislative game plan. They planned to win a general election; which they did. They did not plan for the day after they won and now they have no choice but to keep campaigning. If Raila Odinga did not exist, #TeamDigital would invent him only so that they could have someone to campaign against.
It is not that the Jubilee government has not done anything but that many of the things it is associated with have the whiff malice around them. Take the not-secret-anymore demand for an opinion from the Solicitor-general regarding the law on treason because of political schemes. That has to be one of the stupidest demands ever made of the Office of the Attorney-General. It is something for which no paper work should ever exist. It is something for which the private sector hacks are best suited to accomplish. The Solicitor-General should have responded thus: "Politics is neither good nor bad, and it is not a sound foundation for the charge of treason even if the man you want to target has been thorn in your side. Your only course of action is to defeat him politically, discredit his political schemes."
The Jubilee's true achievements are not being celebrated properly. It might be that holdovers from the past are yet to get the memo about Kenya moving inexorably into the digital age. So there are civil servants who take a perverse pride in the Official secrets Act because it is such a useful tool to hide official skullduggery and dirty tricks if not outright theft of public resources. If we are to retain the Official Secrets Act, it should not be to protect stodgy doddery crooks from embarassment, but the Government from danger, including treason from its most trusted officers. The Official Secrets Act must be a tool for the protection of the right kinds of secrets and for the right kind of reasons. If any reason includes a rationalisation of why a big tender was single-sourced and awarded to a contractor with neither he capacity not experience to undertake the project, then the Act should be repealed.
It is time that my friends in the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit started behaving as if they wanted to communicate government information and not simply sing praises like cheerleaders for every inane idea that crosses some bigwig's head in the National Executive. They should start telling us why free maternity care is a success; why laptops won't be in our children's hands this year; and why Cabinet Secretaries continue to be have like sacred cows. Do Cabinet Secretaries not know that sacred cows make the best hamburgers?
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