One of the failures of the Uhuru Kenyatta regime was a failure of imagination. While he and the members of his Cabinet and the senior officials he placed in critical ministries and state departments had excellent public relations skills, able to frame anything and everything in ways that painted them in a positive light, they were not Blue-Sky Thinkers. They were not thinkers at all.
Let's start with his biggest initiative: the securitisation of the state after the Westgate Attack. President Kenyatta stopped trying to persuade his political rivals (both inside and outside his Cabinet) about the legitimacy of his public spending plans. Instead, he turned to an institution that was required, on pain of treason, to obey him in all things. He appointed serving and former members of the military to sensitive dockets and gave them their marching orders.
As a result, he and his government had no reason tot think through any of their plans. This is how Huduma Namba came to be. What had originally been mooted as an evolution of the Integrated Population Registration System (IPRS), intended to integrated primary databases was bastardised into the private-sector-led Huduma Namba system that faced legal hurdles until it was quietly abandoned. Had he kept his head and ignored the demons whispering the virtues of the private sector in his ear, President Kenyatta would have succeeded in his digitisation project and the Nyayo-House-based national surveillance system would have acquired technical facilities that would have forestalled the massacres at Shakahola Forest in Kilifi.
President Kenyatta's successor faces the same exact challenges and because he has retained some of the same faces and voices from the Jubilee regime, he is at risk of walking the same unimaginative path that President Kenyatta walked. The only difference is that he doesn't seem enamoured of ex-soldiers to see through his plans. Instead, he is salting his regime with has-beens and kiss-asses with complicated legal challenges. These new men and women lack both wisdom and insight; what they bring to the table is unswerving loyalty rather than the ability to tell the emperor that he has no clothes.
Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga were not necessarily wrong about the re-incarnation of the office of assistant minister. President Ruto certainly is not wrong in offering fifty politicians the chance to serve as assistant minister redux. But whether it was the Uhuru list or the current list, both presidents repeated mistakes that went back to 1992/93: hiring ne'er-do-wells whose only value was that they offered temporary political stability. Consequently, the ability for Blue Sky Thinking was lost and it is lost again. The few thinkers in the group will be drowned out by the reckless loose-lipped members of their team. Instead of the IPRS we deserve, we shall get a kenya Kwanza edition of Huduma Namba, with the same legal infirmities as its much-loathed previous evolution.
President Kenyatta's post-presidency tells you all you need to know about how unimaginative his presidency really was. Had he had the foresight and imagination of Daniel Moi or Mwai Kibaki, President Kenyatta would have had no truck with the likes of a five-times-losing presidential candidate who can't seem to let electoral losses go. For sure, he wouldn't be haunting party headquarters like a spurned lover who simply can't let his ex go. If President Ruto isn't careful, the same fate awaits him. The sub rosa murmurings that he is "too young to retire"; the change the constitution efforts by semi-literate parliamentarians; the increasingly desperate search for a political "legacy" out of the ashes of reckless economic decisions; the post-presidency fiddling with his party; and so on and so forth. Uhuru Kenyatta is a cautionary tale if President Ruto chooses to heed the lesson.
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