But does he have spine?

The Finance, Planning and Trade Committee of the National Assembly deals with the following specific subjects: Public finance, monetary policies, public debt, financial institutions, investment and divestiture policies, pricing policies, banking, insurance, population, revenue policies, planning, national development, trade, tourism promotion and management, commerce and industry. 

Only when dealing with a matter related to "population," I believe, could the members of that committee have wandered so far off the track when vetting Uhuru Kenyatta's nominee for the office of the Governor of the Central Bank by demanding an explanation as to why the fifty-four year old superstar economist was unmarried.

Wiser and more experienced heads in the governance of the Central Bank will weigh in on the suitability of Dr Njoroge as the next Governor. I will concentrate a little on something the Nitpicker tangentially touched on a while back: bank supervision. And even with bank supervision, I think it is time we asked an uncomfortable question of the nabobs of the Central Bank: what happens when billions of dubious provenance slosh through the banking and financial system without the Central Bank either detecting it or doing something about it?

Take the alleged billions to be made from narcotics, guns and smuggled sugar. Narcotics cannot be legitimately entered into a Bill of Lading when they pass through Kenya. Someone along the supply chain is paid a tidy sum. That sum is not kept under a mattress anymore; twenty million shillings cannot fit anyway. It must pass through a bank, an insurance company, a stock broker or a mortgage company. Why has this sum, and those connected to illegal arms or smuggled sugar, never been flagged as a suspicious financial transaction? Is it because more often than not it is converted into overpriced, poorly-finished, "apartments"?

The President declared that "security begins with you and me," and I suppose the "you" part includes the Central Bank too. The armed groups waging war against Kenya will not just rely on hawala traders; a more reliable system is the banking and financial one, backed by lawyers and their rules of privilege. And the Governor of the Central Bank is the principal agent in fingering the financiers of the men and women murdering innocent Kenyans in their school hostels and sowing despondency abroad in the land.

Njuguna Ndung'u was a capable enough banker. Dr Njoroge probably will be too; but he must expand his remit and go after the financiers of terror lurking in the laxly supervised corridors of the financial sector. Whether he does or not will be a testament to whether Kenya's war on terror is a serious one or another grand exercise in window-dressing masquerading as action. Dr Njoroge's marital status is neither here nor there; his determination to cut off the terrorists' finances is a more germane subject of discussion.