Eurobonditis

Raila Odinga should never, ever become President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces because if he ever does, my life will become immeasurably boring. He is in his element when he is tilting at windmills. I had overestimated the spine that Cabinet Secretary Rotich had and underestimated just how much fun Agwambo is having—until he commandeered the Serena Hotel and name-dropped like crazy this morning. Now you useless shits can keep saying that he is not "presidential material", whatever that shit means, but you can't deny that the next two to four weeks will be spent by those who have been named by Tinga—and those who imagine they have been named by Tinga—defending their debatable white-as-snow reputations.

Jakom has a penchant for just upending things at inconvenient moments, upending them with a relish that is a little disturbing to those on the receiving end. Since he decided that he had self-actualised and he had nothing to lose really, he has been a pain in the neck of men—and a few women—who simply refused to admit that they had something to lose, that they had yet to reach self-actualisation. At some point I thought the former Devolution CS would arouse a twinge of sympathy in me because f how she was hounded out of office, until she decided to pen and Op-Ed in response to a genius economist and followed it up with a tone-deaf interview on Sunday prime time TV with this stupid phrase, "Nothing special, nothing to write home about" regarding her 160 million shillings in assets and 80 million shillings in debts. Now I am glad that the Raila Odinga steamroller flattened her ministerial career.

This Eurobond affair is not that complex. The Central Bank is the Government's banker. It is the one that does the borrowing for the Government, that is, when the Government borrows, the Central Bank does the borrowing for it. The borrowed funds are not the Central Bank's; the borrowed funds are managed by the National Treasury on behalf of the Government. The instructions to the Central Bank are given by the National Treasury. Everyone else, from the Auditor-General to the Controller of Budget to the Chairman of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee to the Chairman of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission to the Director of Public Prosecutions is either an accessory after the fact or a witness—they are not principals in the Eurobond story. It is no longer a technico-legal headche; it is now a political headache.

The erstwhile Devolution CS was the proverbial blue-eyed girl, in charge of a massive department with a massive budget and she had the ear of the President. Everyone said she was powerful and untouchable. She would be around until Jubilee was done with this place, they said. A friend once told me that the Government has no honour and no friends; if you become an enemy of the Government (by fiddling with its money, for example) the Government will come after you and it will prevail. The erstwhile Devolution CS is now the former Devolution CS and the Op-Eds and TV interviews will not hide the fact that bar the President (maybe), she is now an enemy of the Government—and the cause of all her problems is Raila Odinga.

Agwambo doesn't really need to be President; in his unique place in Kenyan politics, he keeps shaping and reshaping Government. Now that he has made the Eurobond the object of his political interests, let us see how long National Treasury CS Rotich lasts before he too decides that his health has been adversely affected by Eurobonditis. He doesn't have to be guilty of any wrongdoing, but by digging in his heels and refusing to meet Tinga halfway, he has more or less guaranteed that the next two to four weeks will be spent trying to figure out what to say, how to say it, when to say it so that the people who matter don't think he is a thief. On the psychological effects of being the target of Agwambo's attentions, he should look no further than to the travails of the former Devolution CS and learn the proper lessons.