Why is the PSCU still campaigning?

An examination of the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit, PSCU, of the Executive Office of the President of Kenya is an eye-opener. Reconstituted after the Presidential Press Unit was mothballed, it does very little administrative communications, save when Manoah Esipisu, Secretary of Communications in the Executive Office of the President and the PSCU's boss, makes statements on something the President has done or some place the President has visited. But its directors spend a significant amount of time on political messaging; fighting political battles for the President against all comers, whether they are in the media or in the opposition. The social media savvy these men displayed during the 2013 campaign is deployed in their new offices; they all have social media accounts and they almost always post something against a political threat to the President.

Uhuru Kenyatta's regime has been too long on the backfoot and to a large degree, the PSCU is to blame. Mr Kenyatta is the Head of State and Government, the President of the Republic, the Commander in Chief. On the political front, his was a complete victory; his party and his coalition form the majority party in both the National Assembly and the Senate, what Mutahi Ngunyi dubbed the tyranny of numbers. His coalition controls at least 18 county governments, and has a very strong showing in the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy's, CORD, Nairobi City County. Mr Kenyatta should not be explaining himself politically today, more than eighteen months after he was victorious.

The PSCU forgets that a President is never universally loved by his people. Only in theocracies like Iran and Vatican City, banana republics with cults of leadership or in Stalinist dictatorships are the people constantly harangued by their government to sing praises to their leader. Sometimes it is a requirement. I thought Kenya had moved on from the Baba Moi style of leadership. Refreshingly during the decade that Mwai Kibaki was President, he actively discouraged people from singing his praises; simple gestures like not having roads or monuments in his name, and the aversion to oily unctuous titles like "Mtukufu Rais" signalled an end to personality cults. His defenders and apologists in the press or the broadcast media spoke to his policies, administrative decisions and legislative agendas. Many Kenyans believed that Kenya was indeed a working nation simply because the old man actually seemed to want his government to work, never mind the many reported allegations of abuse of office or corruption.

We cannot say the same for the Uhuru Kenyatta government. His PSCU is an unremitting bringer of nothing but political propaganda, some of it very badly done. The President has political enemies and rather than leave the likes of Aden Duale, the National Assembly's Majority Party Leader, or Kithure Kindiki, his Senate Counterpart, or Johnson Sakaja, the TNA Chairman, or Onyango Oloo, the TNA Secretary-General, to deal with the president's political enemies, the PSCU is consumed by them to the almost total exclusion of communicating the President's legislative and administrative agenda or achievements. The PSCU's directors have a disturbingly dystopian view of their duties, and it is reflected in the string of bad news for the government of Uhuru Kenyatta.

Because the PSCU is constantly fighting political wars, it is yet to properly tell Kenyans what exactly the Government of Kenya is doing, what it is achieving, what milestones it is reaching, what technical challenges it is facing, and what it hopes to achieve through its administrative and legislative agendas. It is not enough for the National Treasury to state that "streamlining the tax procedures regime" will have benefits because of harmonization of disparate procedures in one statute; the PSCU must tell us why it is desirable to enact another piece of tax law and why we, as individual Kenyans, must support that agenda. It is a dull exercise, I know. One must read poorly drafted Ministry policies and reports and then distil their essence into soundbites that a six year old could appreciate. Until Mr Esipisu and his directors do that, the peoples' increasing revulsion at the Government of Kenya will not be reversed by scandalously repulsive screeds like the one entitled "All those Makau Mutua antagonises thrive" by the Senior Director of Messaging and Speech-writing on the Capital FM eBlog.