The wrong message

I will buy the cruel accusation that the Ministry of Devolution, in its wisdom - after all, "youth" - paid for a twenty-five thousand shillings condom dispenser. The million-shilling TV and the piano too aren't as outlandish you would think. I draw the line at the sex toys. It is the sex toys that almost persuades me that there is a cruel attempt to smear the Ministry, its Cabinet Secretary and its staff with mud. It is an indictment of the Jubilee Way that there was hesitation before the fierce defenders of the Cabinet Secretary and her people deigned to come to her defense - a slight hesitation, but hesitation nonetheless.

I though the establishment of the PSCU was meant to drive the messaging agenda of the State, not react to scurrilous accusations about pianos, prophylactic dispensers or sex toys. That experiment, sadly, has run its course. The PSCU has consistently been late to the party, putting their foot in it whenever they got the chance, never missing an opportunity to muck things up right royally. It might be the attempt to shoe-horn a political operation into the staid corridors of the Office of the President's Protocol Department, where careers go to die, that has made the PSCU experiment the nightmare it has become. The Devolution Ministry fiasco is the PSCU at its absolute incompetent worst.

The reason why everyone reviled the Grand Coalition Cabinet was because of the poisoned air engendered by the crass buffoonish behavior of the Principal's acolytes, hangers-on and armies of ass-kissing minions. We were done with, so we thought; the Jubilee arrangement was built on solid foundations. After all, these principals have had a long and intimate relationship that goes back to when the one was a gauche politician picked out from the obscurity of staggering wealth to stand for election and the other was a hard-charging assistant minister making a name for himself in Baba Moi's kleptocracy. They stood ana kwa ana in 2002 when presidential ambitions lay shattered in the aftermath of the NARC landslide.

The PSCU was the wool we would pull over the people's eyes, showing them nothing about the accommodations and compromises that make any coalition a fraught affair, and in this coalition the accommodations and compromises have come at a great cost for one than for the other. This has made all the PSCU attempts to shape the narrative come a cropper, especially in the online sphere. While most of the retweet-happy crowd simply doesn't care for the facts, so long as the facts are ex, there is a growing coalition of the ones described as woke, and they are no longer taking things at face value.

Every government, no matter how popular, eventually loses legitimacy. This ones has come rather fast. The efforts to control the narrative will fail because there are simply to many "condom dispenser" stories coming out of its ministries for he narrative to be controllable. The least they can hope for is that the disappointment does not turn into anger and a resolute decision to look for leadership elsewhere, including, horror of horrors, in the shockingly inept opposition. The Jubilee has an adept online operation; it has a completely inept political messaging operation. If you are still in doubt, watch the Cabinet Secretary deny for the last time that she has no hand, no hand at all, in the purchases of condom dispensers.