Are you a muthamaki?

One of the things that remains unexamined, in Kenya at least, is the role political organising at the grassroots played a key role in Donald Trump's election and the retention by the GOP of its majority in Congress. US citizens, including partisans, can trace the origins of their political parties and strains of political and ideological thought to seminal moments in US history. Even independent voters and candidates in the US espouse specific ideologies, though they are difficult to pigeon-hole in US tribal politics. Few Kenyans, if any, can do the same.

Kenya's oldest party is the Kenya African National Union, Kanu, a decrepit, corrupt and moribund political institution captured by a declining tribal cabal that has failed to read the writing on the wall since the fiasco of Kenya's last mlolongo party elections in 1988. Having become a vehicle for the centralisation and personalisation of State power over the reigns of two autocrats, it lost all legitimacy when it became the de jure ruling party and acquired a malign reputation as the vehicle for the corruption of the institutions of government, the aggrandisement of the well-connected few and the basis for the political excommunication of Kenya's nascent progressives, liberals and socialists. It's defeat in December 2002 should have signalled the re-emergence of liberal political thought. It didn't. Instead, Kenya is paying the price for the hollowing out of the institutions of Government and the State-political capture of civil society.

While US citizens can find and fight over ideological points, points they use to organise one another, Kenyans are not. The recent revelations regarding the banking sector and the theft of hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of shillings from the coffers of the National Youth Service demonstrate that even on a matter that should unite all Kenyans, the condemnation of graft, Kenyans (or, at least, their political and religious leaders) do not have an ideological unity. Those that self-identify as members of the political opposition do not come to the anti-graft table with clean hands, the putrid nature of their dealings when they were in positions of political power befouling the air and obscuring facts that should be brought to light in order for Kenyans to engage robustly in a debate of what it means to hold political power in Government. The only argument that seems to prevail in dealing with the corruption of the State is whether or not one is a muthamaki, or its equivalent; his or her culpability in the theft of billions of shillings is neither here nor there.

May US citizens are wringing their hands over the capture of the Republican Party by Donald Trump and his insurgents; in Kenya, however, the "purchase" of political parties, for their use as vehicles for the acquisition of political power, is greeted with pomp and celebration. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, in the wake of their indictments at the International Criminal Court, demonstrated the benefits to be gained from the purchase and personalisation of political vehicles in the wake of the experimentation of 2005/2006 by Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka in their tussle over the Orange Democratic Movement Party of Kenya (long since renamed the Wiper Democratic Movement). 

Political vehicles in Kenya are identified by the politicians who "own" them: Mr Musyoka "owns" Wiper, Mr Odinga "owns" ODM, Musalia Mudavadi "owns" Amani National Congress, Alfred Mutua "owns" Maendeleo Chap Chap and Martha Karua "owns" Narc-Kenya. Noe of these parties, despite their party constitutions and political manifestos, have a true ideology or following. They are empty vessels and like all debes, they have perfected the art of making very loud noises when elections are imminent. 

The next nine months will witness political mobilisation on an unprecedented scale and great political noise; what will not occur is a robust discussion of ideological political issues that affect the majority of Kenyans, those who live in or hovering near poverty. Politicians will paint each other in bad light and mobilise Kenyan voters to ram home their personal attacks on one another. But on the successes or failures of Government and the immiseration of millions because of difficult political and economic choices, there will nary be a peep.

Those Kenyans bemoaning Hillary Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Trump do themselves or their causes a great disservice if they fail to examine where Kenya's political party evolution is headed. They imagine that the highly partisan divisions in the US have a mirror in Kenya because of the decade-long contest between the Uhuru-Ruto alliance against the Raila Odinga phenom. Unless we reckon with the enervation of political institutions through the personalisation of the institutions of the State, we shall be unable to participate meaningfully in the political process in Kenya.

The Gender Principle and patriarchy

pa·tri·arch·y

ˈpātrēˌärkē

noun a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line; a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it; a society or community organized on patriarchal lines.

All three meanings of "patriarchy" apply to Kenya, by and large. To deny it is to deny that water is wet, i.e., futile. Knowing it and acknowledging it, however, are difficult things for Kenyan males because it would mean accepting the unfairness of it all and the need for cultural reforms for which many Kenyan men are wholly unprepared.

We made a creditable start in 2010 by endorsing at a referendum a very progressive constitution that decreed the equality of the sexes in marriage, childcare, property, employment and political office. Well, on the latter two, it attempted a deft balancing act and fell between two stools in shame and disappointment.

Known as the Two-thirds Gender Principle, the public service (and the private sector, according to a keener interpretation of Articles 2(4), 3(1), 10(2)(b), 19(2), 19(3(a), 20(2), 21(1) and 27) have an obligation to ensure that not more than two-thirds of the members of any elective or appointive position belong to the same gender. In Kenya, as in many nations, the physical manifestation of patriarchy is in the positions of authority that are held by men, which many women either do not, cannot or are discouraged from holding. Political offices and the corner suites of corporations are just the most obvious. Other insidious prohibitions are those that say women should not own land, should not inherit land from their parents, or the cultural, hetero-normative rules that declare that women are the ones primarily responsible for the care of infants and small children, that their exclusive domain is the kitchen or that their sexual agency is by the sufferance of the fathers, brothers, husbands or sons.

The Two-thirds Gender Principle was endorsed by a majority of voters; however, this is not the whole story. Had Kenyans been invited to vote, clause by clause, would the Two-thirds Gender Principle have survived? I am not so sure because despite its endorsement, together with the other bits and bobs of the Bill of Rights, Kenyans, in 2013, did not elect a single woman as a governor of a county and few raised their voices that the principle was being watered down in the appointment of Cabinet Secretaries or Principle Secretaries. Indeed, it is only in one county that a woman was elected as the Speaker (Nakuru). In appointments, while the governing bodies of state corporations attempted to implement the principle, the vast majority of chairpersons and CEOs remain men, appointed for political expediency more often than not.

We already know what needs to be done in order to contribute to the obliteration of patriarchy in both public and private spheres. Among the things that we must be do is to signal the seriousness with which we take affirmative action by appointing more women into more visible political and administrative positions in government and political parties and to ensure that more women are able to compete effectively against men for political offices. Some will call it tokenism, but sometimes tokenism has a way of overcoming its shortcomings and surprising us all. We've already made a step with the ratification of our constitution in 2010; we should deepen and strengthen its principles and widen the pool of women who should be elected or appointed to high office. More and more women need to be persuaded that it is OK to seek political and social power, that power is not just the preserve of their fathers, brothers, husbands or sons.

Some would rather vote for a dead gorilla

Many, including myself, were dumbfounded by the fact that so many Kenyans could deliberately choose candidates who might have participated in the slaughter and mass displacement of fellow Kenyans, and who had yet to clear their names of these charges. — Rasna Warah, The Daily Nation

Few Kenyans truly have an intimate relationship with their elected representatives, whether serving in the Executive branch or legislative branch of Government. But many have a transactional relationship with them — do some thing for me and I will vote for you. Very rarely is this transactional relationship coloured by questions of ethics or morality; after all, the provision of public goods or services such as water services, healthcare services, bridges, roads, electricity supply or good schools and teachers has very little to do with whether your elected representative is a good man or a bad man. All that matters to you is whether he can bring home the bacon — or if you believe that he can bring home the bacon.

In 2013, when Kenyans went to the polls to elect a new government under its still shiny-new constitution, they were faced with the choice of whether or not to elect two men who had been indicted at the International Criminal Court for their alleged role in the 2007/2008 post-election violence that led to the deaths of scores of Kenyans, the displacement of hundreds of thousands, the destruction of billions of shillings in property, the sexual violation of hundreds of thousands and the deep ethnic polarisation of the country papered over by an alliance between the aforementioned ICC indictees. A majority of voters, by a slim margin, ignored the allegations against the two men and today, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, are President and Deputy President of Kenya.

At the beginning of this month, the United States chose to elect a thrice-married misogynist, sexist, racist petit Caligula accused of sexually assaulting at least a dozen women, whose business is being tried for defrauding thousands of US citizens and who bragged, at one time, of how smart he was for using the US Tax Code, which he thought was a bad thing, to not pay twenty years of US federal income tax.

In Kenya, as in the USA, few people actually worried that much about the morals of their elected representatives; the only question that seemed to matter, beyond the popular media trope of the ethnicisation of Kenyan elections, was whether the elected representatives could bring home the bacon. What I find surprising is that the evidence that had been used to indict Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto had not been tested in the cauldron of a criminal trial; they were, so far as any supporters of the rule of law would have it, innocent of the charges. They had a right, as much as any other Kenyan, to offer themselves for election despite the grave accusations against them or the horror expressed by those who opposed them, including members of the Fourth Estate and the civil society.

Secondly, it is impossible to square the declaration of a free society if that freedom is subject to the dictatorship of the moral minority who determine, without public debate or sanction, who is and who isn't morally eligible to stand for election. We have been litigating the 2013 election since Raila Odinga lost and one of the key elements of that litigation is the ICC indictment against Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto. We are either free to choose whom we wish to elect or we are not; there is no middle ground.

Thirdly, we ignore the dictatorship of the moral minority at our peril. Do not get me wrong; I did not vote for Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto in 2013. I believed they were unqualified to hold the reins of power. But I didn't agree with the unexamined declaration that Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka were Kenya's saviours. This narrative had gained currency on the vocal endorsements by civil society stalwarts, members of the donor classes, foreign diplomatic missions and liberal intelligentsia, which decreed that the ICC indictees were beyond the pale and that their election would have adverse consequences on Kenya. This liturgy decreed that the sins of Messrs Odinga and Musyoka were irrelevant; the only sins that mattered were those of Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto, an illiberal thought if there ever was one.

One of the elements that seems to link the 2013 Kenyan election and the 2016 US one is the rebellion against one liberal narrative that was consecrated one presidential campaign as legitimate and the other as not. Few Kenyans, or US citizens for that matter, want to be told whom to elect and when they remain unpersuaded, few Kenyans or US citizens will respond kindly when they are collectively indicted as stupid, insane, lazy, brainwashed, sexist, misogynist, supporters of rape culture or any of the vile adjectives liberals are fond of using against those who disagree with their liturgy. This rebellion sometimes leads to the election of men or women we personally find repellent.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from both the elections of UhuRuto and Donald J Trump, it is that if you want to lose an election for your favourite candidate, label all those who disagree with your pet ideas as stupid, insane, lazy, brainwashed, sexist, misogynist, supporters of rape culture and similar vile terms. It is almost guaranteed that if those people go to the polls, they will not vote for your candidate. Some would rather vote even for dead animals as 11,000 voters did in the US by voting for a dead gorilla.

I can't empathise

When Barack Obama was elected for the first time in 2008, I was over the moon. I couldn't wait for the day he would take the oath of office. When he was re-elected a second time, I dared to dream that the United States was coming to terms with its past once and for all. But the 2016 presidential race in the United States produced no such candidates as would inspire as Barack Obama managed to do twice in the past decade. We got an entitled insider and a race-baiter, instead. It was a tragic end to Mr Obama's presidency.

I don't sympathise with the millions of Clintonian supporters; their "devastation" doesn't leave me feeling angry, afraid or sad. I wish I could say I empathise with them, but I don't. Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate with a very long record in public service, a record that inevitably sunk her chances at the presidency. One of the most tragic legacies of her husband's presidency in the 1990s was what was known as the crime bill and the most important soundbite was when she called young, Black teenage boys in conflict with the law "superpredators", a term that has endured long after it has been demonstrated by science and statistics that young, Black men are not predestined to lives of criminality.

I don't doubt that she believed that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy against her and her husband, but it does not explain the overweening secrecy they cultivated about everything to do with their public lives, including their relations with high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party. The revelations that last two successive chairwomen of the Democratic National Convention manipulated the system in order to guarantee Mrs Clinton victory, first during her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders and second, during the televised presidential debates against Donald Trump, paint a sordid picture about what she imagines "fair play" means.

But it is her war-mongering stances that place her beyond the pale for many of us. If it was not for her full-throated support for "humanitarian" intervention in Libya, the Islamic State would not e filling in the vacuum left behind after a NATO aerial campaign allowed enough jihadis to topple Muammar Gaddafi's regime and murder him in cold blood. My continent has been rendered more unsafe by the creation of a safe haven in Libya for murderous, suicidal religious zealots because of a policy of intervention that has been shown, again and again, to be deeply flawed. (Before you point out that Muammar Gaddafi was an evil dictator, I ask you to consider how, as Secretary of State, Mrs Clinton was unable to turn her jaundiced eye towards the patron royal family of evil doers, the al Sauds, and the billions of dollars they have invested in spreading Wahabbism all around the world and jihadis that their strand of Islam and money inspires and supports.)

During her campaign, she had the gall to make sweeping condescending remarks about Donald Trump's supporters while being portrayed as high-minded and having taken the high road, as Mrs Obama would have us believe. Labelling Mr Trump's supporters as being in a basket of deplorables she seemed incapable of even contemplating that quite possibly half the voters who hated her had legitimate reasons for doing so and that not all of them were motivated by misogyny, self-loathing, racism or sexism.

She found it impossible to empathise with them, she found their grievances inauthentic and she underestimated just how much "middle" America was suffering even after Barack Obama's valiant efforts to right the economy. She forgot a cast-iron rule of presidential politics: don't leave any vote unturned. Instead of fighting to persuade these voters of the justness of her candidacy, she dismissed them, much as they had been dismissed by "mainstream" media, Hollywood and liberal-progressive activists, as semi-literate, Luddite, sex-starved misogynistic serial sexual predators being stupidly led by the nose by Breitbart, Fox News and Ted Nugent.

No, I don't sympathise or empathise. She has no one to blame but herself. She is responsible for her loss. It says something that almost half the eligible voters did not go to the polls and that Donald Trump won the presidency with about a quarter of the eligible voters. If she had been an honourable, half-way honest, half-way decent candidate, she would be doing her victory lap today. She isn't and she won't.

Buyer's remorse

Buyer's remorse. The moment you pull money out of your wallet and hand it over to the cashier, regret sets in. It doesn't matter of the payment was a matter of life or death, regret is inevitable for that species of man that lives pay-cheque to pay-cheque, is laden down with myriad responsibilities, and considers even life-saving goods and services as being tools of the devil sent to Earth to impoverish him.

But I don't know anyone who could possibly suffer buyer's remorse if they emptied out their bank accounts, sold all their worldly belongings (except their clean underwear; never underestimate the allure of clean undies), took early retirement and took their entire pension in cash, borrowed from friends and family, and robbed the neighbourhood Equity to buy this...

 

...or this...

...or this...

Even if it bankrupted their family to the third and fourth generations, some men would definitely consider buying any one of those or this...

 

I probably would too, acute indigestion bordering on a cardiac event induced by buyer's remorse notwithstanding.

All men are trash

I am selfish, unforgiving, judgmental and mean. I hoard so that others lack. I lie and I cheat. When I steal, I pray (the irony of it doesn't escape me) that someone else carries water for it. I am not all these things all the time; I am some of them some of the time. I am also kind to old ladies. I don't kick small animals or children in order to feel superior. I empathise with the weak and vulnerable and, every now and then, I perform acts of kindness in penance for my sins. I am not all these things all the time, or even some of them some of the time. And I am not a contradiction in terms. I am human and my humanity is often summed up in my many, many flaws.

A man I have never met has taken on an assignment for a company whose products I enjoy. He comes up with a unique way to promote the company: he invites men and women who wish to partake of the company's products to send him stories of their overcoming adverse situations. (This man writes for a living and does so rather well. He writes so well that many people celebrate his writing.) So many people send him their stories, he edits them and publishes them on social media platforms. A young woman sends him her story. It is a harrowing story. And he publishes it. And then the shit hits the fan.

Certain facts are agreed between the man and the man's lynch mob: a young woman has been raped three times. She says that she has forgiven her rapists and that she is in a friendship with two of them. She says that she suffers from a brain disorder but that she manages it with medication, exercise and prayer. She sent this man her story and he published it. The story offended many people so much so they took to the online social media platforms to point out the wrongness of publishing the story. The man removed the story from its online home. Those facts are the basis for a robust debate but a debate on what remains murky.

Did the man celebrate "rape culture" by publishing the woman's story? Did the company the man was working for take advantage of a vulnerable woman to sell its products? Should the man have first considered finding psycho-social counsellors for the woman instead of taking her story and used it to sell stuff for a faceless corporation? Should the man have published the story knowing that the woman blamed herself for being raped? In the heat of online verbal outrage and combat, it is clear that many think the man shouldn't have published the story and should have gotten the woman some kind of help. Many also see nothing wrong in publishing the story in the way that it was published.

I am a man and so I am unlikely to know how traumatised a woman who has been raped will be, how long she will take to recover (if she recovers at all), how stigmatised she will be because she was raped, or how weak (or strong) she will be after the ordeal. I cannot tell you how rape culture affects women because I am not a woman. I cannot tell you that I have the language skills to discern when what I would think of as conversation is in actual fact the celebration of rape culture.

But as a man, I am supposed to take responsibility for the evil doings of all men. Where women have been the victims of a masculine culture, I must be self-aware, penitent and pro-active in erasing that culture. As a man, I am privileged simply because I am a man and I must take that into consideration every single time any woman suffers injury or violence at the hands of a man. Male privilege is wrong and I must apologise for it every single time it is responsible for pain to a woman. It doesn't matter whether or not I am a decent man; all that matters is that I am a man and all men are trash.

This writer has been reminded of this truism. He cannot escape its consequences and consequently he must be reminded that his acts, innocent or not, were a celebration of patriarchy and rape culture and that they were unforgivable. He is solely responsible for re-traumatising that woman. It matters not how many future good works he does, his position on rape culture is now known and immutable and he is among the worst offenders. He will never be able to apologise enough to be forgiven. Ever. Whether that is true or not is immaterial; it is now known that indeed, all men are trash.

Our foreign policy muddle

Kenya has been the principal voice in two key regional peace initiatives whose effects are acutely felt in Nairobi. These are in relation to the Sudan peace process and the Somalia peace process. While the war between the Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan may be over, South Sudan is in the middle of a civil war that shows no signs of abating and has frustrated the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the United Nations and the African Union. The Somalia civil war, raging since 1992, also shows no signs of ending and now that it has sucked in al Qaeda land the Islamic State, might never end.

Kenya's foreign policy over the past eight years has focussed almost exclusively on the International Criminal Court; while Kenya should have taken a lead in stabilising the peace in South Sudan and keeping foreign fighters from making a home in Somalia's badlands, it has spent more time rallying the African Union against the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute that established it. Victory is in sight with the intended withdrawal of South Africa from the treaty, though if Jacob Zuma loses a vote of confidence, the South African government may yet heed Botswana's advise and stay in.

Kenya has troops in South Sudan and Somalia, the former as part of a United Nations peace-keeping force and the latter as an African Union stabilisation force charged with supporting the Somalia federal government. Neither mission is going well. The United Nations' Secretary-General, after an enquiry into the military response to deadly attacks in July on a U.N. compound housing 27,000 displaced people, fired the Kenyan mission commander because “a lack of leadership on the part of key senior mission personnel culminated in a chaotic and ineffective response to the violence” as reported in international newspapers. 

Kenya reacted poorly, to say the least. The President announced that Kenya was pulling its troops out of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and that it would no longer support the South Sudan peace process. We must ask, in relation to Kenya's near-abroad, what is Kenya's foreign policy? The Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) projects were supposed to connect Kenya's new port in Lamu with South Sudan, Ethiopia and Northern Uganda. However, the Government seemed to prioritise the controversial Standard Gauge Railway projects, took its focus of the escalating instability in South Sudan that persuaded Uganda and Ethiopia to push ahead with alternative projects; Uganda went ahead with plans for a pipeline to Tanzania's Port of Tanga and Ethiopia went ahead with its railway to Djibouti.

South Sudan's continued instability is a threat to the stability of the whole of Northern Kenya, especially now that Ethiopian troops are withdrawing from Somalia and Burundi has threatened to withdraw too. The flow of small arms, fuelling the resource-based conflicts in Kenya's northern frontiers, has increased. Meanwhile, because of the stretched-thin non-capacity of Kenya's intelligence and security forces, more and more al Shabaab attacks are taking place against the civilian population further undermining the business and economic links between Kenya and its neighbours and preventing full-scale domestic development programmes from being implemented effectively.

No doubt the ICC Question was important at the start of the current government's tenure; its resolution would stabilise the domestic power-play between the ruling alliance and the opposition coalition. But the focus that it drew away from South Sudan, Somalia, southern Ethiopia and Northern Uganda has fuelled domestic crises of its own for the residents of Kenya's north. With Kenya's withdrawal from South Sudan, its insistence on the deportation of refugees back to Somalia and its continued military losses in Somalia point to an incoherent foreign policy, especially when Kenyan businesses are losing money due to the instability on those countries. Our policy must be clarified. Whether it will depends on whether or not the Cabinet Secretary waddles off to the African Union Commission.

Ego over ambition. Again.

If you live in Kenya, that would be a very mediocre question to ask, especially on twitter where the whole world reads you. — @EAukot

I do not have a postgraduate degree in anything except bullshit, but even I know about ad hominem attacks. I believe, in short, that the fallacy means that you dismiss someone's argument by dismissing the person for their personal failures but not for the failures in their logical arguments. In the above caustic response, my interlocutor responds to a simple question: "What illegal acts of govt (sic) was @JBoinnet serving [when he arrested Boniface Mwangi and his colleagues from Freedom Corner]?" The answer is, in effect, that as a Kenyan I should know better and that I should do so because the whole world will read my stupidity from my mediocre question.

This isn't the first time that a putative candidate for elective office has adopted a dismissive tone when engaging with the online rabble. Miguna Miguna, after a brief flirtation with radical honesty, couldn't maintain a civil keyboard when confronted with his pie-in-the-sky dreams. He is a serial Twitter blocker who, before he consigns one to the cold shoulder world of the blocked, calls one names and generally reminds one that Miguna Miguna is smarter and more honest that one.

Ekuru Aukot served the Committee of Experts with distinction, I believe. He is also a constitutional lawyer of note. He has declared an interest in elective office in 2017 and is floating the Third Way Alliance as his political vehicle of choice. Mr Aukot is one among many and despite his many accomplishments, one other colourless novice politician among dozens who have cut their political teeth in many political campaigns. He forgets the first rule of politics: don't leave any vote unturned and you don't do that by being condescending towards the slow-witted, no matter how justified you feel. It is easy to make enemies in politics (permanent or not) but not so easy to make friends or form alliances.

Mr Aukot styles himself as a staunch anti-corruption crusader, yet, other than ensuring that the draft harmonised constitution was passed at a referendum largely intact, he doesn't seem to have done much on the anti-corruption front in Kenya bar a few TV appearances and numerous anti-corruption tweets. Boniface Mwangi has had his head bashed in by policemen whenever he has led demonstrations against MPigs; Mr Aukot only tweets about it. Another anti-corruption campaigner, Okiya Omtata, has sued those whom he accuses of corruption; Mr Aukot has analysed those suits without offering much that is new.

If we elected political leaders on the basis of their academic smarts, Mr Aukot would be a shoo-in. However, things are never that simple in Kenya. Smart is all well and good but if you have not brought home the bacon, of what use are you to us? He styles himself as an anti-corruption crusader but he has no record in the war on corruption. Had he stuck to his excellent qualifications as a constitutional lawyer, he could point to his achievements as the Executive Director of the Committee of Experts. But now that he seems to be throwing bricks at those curious about his putative candidacy — what office he seeks remains murky — it is likely that he is going to be one other brainiac whose political ambitions couldn't overcome his enormous ego.

An absurd complaint

Being an insider is intoxicating. You are privy to secrets no one else is privy to. You get to know stuff before others do. You get to know things others will never know. It gives one a warm feeling when they are superior in one respect or another. You have code words and special language. You're part of a clique that is recognised and protected by its special character. Sometimes, you get to wear special, identifying things, like wrist-bands.

Everyone wants to feel special. It doesn't matter how accomplished one is, if one doesn't derive special attention from ones accomplishments, few are likely to be happy with that state of affairs. It doesn't matter whether one is in an official position or a private one, one mostly wants to be recognised as special, both within and outside ones organisation.

Joe Mucheru, the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and Technology, must feel really special. He was written to the Media Council of Kenya arguing, among other things, that the Nation Media Group, through its Business Daily newspaper, has defamed the Government of Kenya by reporting on the interim audit report of the Ministry of Health and by characterising some of the ministry's officials as corrupt and thieves. Mr Mucheru, in the name of the Government, wants an apology. What a stupid idea!

It is not unreasonable to suggest that some Ministry of Health officials are corrupt or thieves. If any of them thinks that they have been unfairly characterised by a newspaper, they can demand satisfaction from the Media Council or from the courts. It is not the business of the Cabinet Secretary for ICT to carry water for government officials who think they have been defamed or have had libelous or slanderous statements made about them.

No less than the Auditor-General reports that on average, one-third of the appropriations made to the government are "lost". His last estimate of "lost" national treasure came to about three-hundred billion shillings. It is possible that out of that three hundred billion, five billion "disappeared" from the Ministry of Health and that the Ministry's Principal Secretary had a hand in the "disappearance" as the ministry's accounting officer. If the PS believes that his internal auditor, whoever leaked the interim audit report, the Auditor-General or the Business Daily have defamed him, he should retain the services of a white-shoe lawyer and sue all the parties concerned.

If the Business Daily has deliberately slanted or skewed its stories to paint the government as corrupt and full of thieves, the government can only blame itself; it doesn't amount to "outright defamation and character assassination" when the president himself admits that his anti-corruption officials have failed him in the war in graft, as he did during the Governance and Accountability Summit held at State House and televised by, among others, Nation Media's NTV. (We call it estoppel; once you admit something and it is used against you, you can't bitch about it.)

I bet that when Mr Mucheru was penning his three-page diatribe to the Media Council it never occurred to him to write to the Attorney-General and ask for his legal advice; after all, the A-G is the principal legal advisor of the Government, including ambitious insiders like Mr Mucheru. The A-G would have reminded him that governments never complain about their portrayals in the media; if they are good, they will be defended. If they are incompetent, their incompetence will be plain for all to see.

Mr Mucheru is now an insider and pretty soon he will be an insider par excellence. He is engaged in a war that he cannot win. It is possible that the milquetoast Media Council will go along with his asinine complaint but if he is foolish enough to pursue his complaint through the courts of law, he will have bitten off more than he can chew. Official corruption and thievery is a presidentially admitted fact. Will he ask the head of his government to apologise too? Absurd, right? So is his complaint.

It's time

When you read the words "national disaster", you think of devastation on a massive scale, whose immediacy, speed, destructive power and catastrophic consequences overwhelm conventional emergency services such as municipal fire, police or ambulance services. More often than not, national disasters tend to be natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or erupting volcanoes. 

Not all disasters have the immediacy of, say, earthquakes of floods; they may take months or even years before their devastation is realised. Think of HIV/AIDS which sometimes demonstrates a sloth-like pace before suddenly the healthcare system is overwhelmed by thousands of patients who become a drain on its facilities, doctors, diagnostic services and palliative care systems. The HIV/AIDS pandemic's effects reflect the same devastation on the body politic as corruption. So it is not so far-fetched to describe corruption as a national disaster.

In recent months, not a week has passed without some revelation of mendacity and malfeasance in the financial affairs of the State. Both the national and county governments have been revealed to be riddled with men and women willing to bend or break the law in their selfish pursuit of private gains from public treasure. That they are responsible for the immiseration of millions of Kenyans seems not to have pricked their consciences leading some of us to conclude that these men and women must have a measure of sociopathy in their psychological profiles.

The corruption of the financial affairs of the State is so widespread that Kenyans instinctively believe every wild rumour about financial impropriety regardless of its provenance. But that doesn't obscure that corruption has so infested the State's official and unofficial organs that not even technological barriers have prevented the unlawful expropriation of billions of shillings meant for the common good. The much-vaunted Integrated Financial Management Information System, designed to assign responsibility and power to key public servants during the procurement of goods and services by the public service has proven to be no barrier to the corruption that continues to bedevil public procurement.

It is time we admitted to ourselves that corruption has enervated every level of the government, hollowed out many policing authorities, overwhelmed the public prosecutor's office as well as the judiciary such that it cannot be tackled without concerted national attention. A declaration of national disaster might be the only way to focus national attention on all the sectors that require action, including investigations and judicial procedures.  The time has come for all Kenyans to take part in the war on graft, to shame the thieves and to punish them without mercy. Sitting on fences and passing of bucks will no longer cut it.

Thanks for the apology but please resign

Some of the qualities of a good leader have a moral-ethical bent to them: transparency, integrity and accountability. These, believe it or not, are found in Article 10 of the Constitution as part of the values and principles of governance. They apply to everyone who "makes or implements public policy decisions" such as the decision to streamline public finance or the implementation of the Integrated Financial Information System, IFMIS. Vague-sounding the principles may be, but, I believe, they encapsulate what we, the people, wish our government to be, to reflect and to protect.

So, while Nicholas Muraguri may not be the most sensible public officer in government, and his tongue seems to get the better of him every now and then such that he stuffs his foot in his mouth, he seems to have taken lessons from the stupidities of Philip Kinisu who declared that he would not resign when conflicts of interest related to companies he is associated with came to light. He wouldn't resign, he was emphatic, because he had done nothing wrong. Between his I-will-not-resign declaration and his resignation were barely sixty days!

Mr Muraguri was reckless and intemperate and that alone should be cause enough for the President to demand his resignation. (The President won't ask. Regional balance meshuggah, see?) He is, however, an astute student of politics; his apology, inadequate as it was, is a brilliant stroke. He admits that what was reported about his utterances was (largely) true; his integrity may be shit, but he is transparent and has, in effect, asked us to hold him to account and forgive him.

He also hopes that by the time the Auditor-General is done with his ministry, missing documents will have been found and the allegedly mission five billion will have been fully accounted for. I fear he will not be so lucky. The drip-drip-drip of scandalous revelations from the Ministry of Health has been incessant since the day thirty-eight billion shillings was set aside for "medical equipment for the counties," seemingly without consulting the end-users, county governments. This missing five billion is only the latest in a long list of financial queries that the PS has to address. His apology may have come too late to save his ass.

The Ministry of Health is a surprisingly opaque institution; no one really knows what goes on in there other than the occasional mysterious battle to appoint the National Hospital Insurance Fund's, Kenyatta National Hospital's or Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital's CEOs, a succession of lacklustre, grey-faced, colourless, well-connected mandarins with the charisma of chalk and the PR skills of a tub of lard. It takes a minute before one realises that it is its ubiquity that makes it so adept at hiding in plain sight; billions go missing, drugs shipments disappear, doctors and nurses regularly go on strike, epidemics regularly break out and public health policy remains stuck in the colonial era but few of us see it or appreciate the insidious nature of that ministry.

Mr Muraguri, his Cabinet Secretary and the senior-most officials of the ministry in charge of making and implementing policy may have attempted to put the genie of Mr Muraguri's threats back in the bottle, but the djinn of misgovernance is already out there wreaking havoc without mercy. On Mr Muraguri's watch, infant vaccines have vanished, putting millions of children at risk of infection. That alone should be grounds enough for Mr Muraguri to resign if not to be fired outright.

It starts with you

I don't know why it matters, but it matters that you have to be inspired in order to aspire to something great. Greatness is not borne of boredom; it is borne of great inspiration, commitment and focus. In our never-ending war on graft, inspiration, commitment and focus are notable by their absence. It matters a great deal that we are about as inspired as a stop-motion film of paint drying. In the dark.

When the Business Daily reported that an interim report of an audit of the Ministry of Health's 2015/2016 books showed a massive five-billion shillings hole, double-payments, over-invoicing and unaccounted-for expenditures, we were not surprised. When it turned out that one-and-a-half billion shillings, meant for the President's flagship free maternity programme, was also (allegedly) missing from the Ministry's coffers, we were not surprised. When it was reported that when the Principal Secretary was confronted with these allegations, instead of denying them and being done with the story, he had the temerity to threaten the reporter with unwarranted invasions of her privacy, our capacity for shock was exhausted. Dr Willy Mutunga's observation that "we are a bandit economy" no longer stings in the light of the events of the past two days.

 

Public relations can only take you so far; at some point, when they ask you to show them the radiation therapy equipment and operators you promised them, you have to show them. When they ask to see the "10,000 housing units" you have built for police, real brick-and-mortar buildings better be standing. Glossy newspaper pullouts are not, nor have they ever been, public policy. They have never been the genesis of public policy. They never, ever will be. PR can inspire but it can also be abused. At this moment, our relationship with our government can only be termed as an abusive relationship.

 

When the serial loser, Raila Odinga, finally got his ass handed to him by the Supreme Court, most of us just shrugged our shoulders, thanked God almighty of all creation that no dingbats had spontaneously disagreed with the electoral commission or the Supreme Court, and turned to the niggly problem of trying to earn a living in what was no longer Mwai Kibaki's working nation. We were a tech-enabled Digital Nation living in a Digital Era and our children would have the Digital Tools necessary to survive in a hostile and competitive global commercial environment in which everyone with a widget was making out like King Midas. That illusion was swiftly dissipated when it became brutally clear that the Dynamic Duo were neither prepared for the burdens of high office nor that they cared sufficiently for the working stiffs getting blown up in bloody regularity. PR supplanted policy. Speeches supplanted action.

The only ones who are truly loyal are the ones who have nothing to lose yet still stick around, no matter what. It is amazing that in three years the First Lady of Kenya has managed to engender such goodwill from even the hardest of hearts such that she has bought and equipped forty-seven mobile clinics in a bold plan to guarantee that no mothers die at childbirth and and children survive their births. Beyond Zero has been her rallying cry. It has been our cry too, even the cynical among us. And it has been betrayed cynically and cruelly. Even if it turns out that the Auditor-General missed a few receipts here and there and the figure was "just" five hundred million that was missing, one-tenth of the alleged missing five billion, you will have missed the point if you thought that this vindicated her husband's government or his Ministry of Health. What it will have done is to remind every Kenyan alive that this government inspires the worst instincts in its worst state officers, of whom there seems to be an endless supply.

We are not inspired, not by the glitz, glamour, pomp or circumstance of all the world's leaders making a beeline for our sunny shore. Not even the Pope lifted the mood. Matteo Renzi? Ati who? Obama tried, but he lost us the moment his Power Africa Initiative consumed the bulk of the serikali seriousness. Narendra Modi? Meh! We though we were on the same side as the boss when he said he would boldly lead the fight against thieves. Didn't he in fact send his ministers packing for their sins? But when a mere ministry functionary has the temerity to argue that "government will spy on you" for challenging him on his audit, well, the security of public funds starts with you, my friend.

Keep the mic hot, Grace

One day I will die. Hopefully that day is far enough into the future that I shall be able to pinch my great grandchildren in the cheek (while secretly plying them with atrocious candy against their parents' express wishes) and grouse, like my grandmother does, about the utter ruination this country is coming to because of its wayward young people.

Death is the biblical thief in the night, stealing upon you without so much as a by your leave, cutting short a conversation, a feeling, an emotion, a relationship...a life. It spares no one; not the rich or poor, not the famous or infamous, not the mighty or small. It comes for us all and leaves behind confusion, pain, destruction, devastation.

You can't escape it. Like they say on the silver screen comedies, No one comes out alive. We know this to be true, as true as the morning sun and the nighttime moonlight. As true as the four seasons and colours of the rainbow. As true as love. Yet we are never ready for it. It strikes and we are left scrambling to understand Why. It takes and takes and takes; it never, ever gives back.

When it comes, unexpectedly and unwanted, we are left to pick up the pieces, to mend broken hearts, to imagine completed conversations, to rebuild the devastation in our lives, to fill the empty places in our very souls. We picture a place, in our deepest minds, where the Dearly Departed will find peace, even though when they were here, with us, they were at peace, even if it was momentary, though not momentous. We hope, we pray, that if there is a Better Place, they have found it and it is awesome. (I love to think that they all become petrolheads and that they spend the day racing Ferrari F355s, AC Cobra 427s, De Tomaso Panteras, Aston-Martins DB7 GTs, Holden Monaro GT-Rs and Mercedes-Benz E55 AMGs, but then that's the one-day-I-will-have-a-V8-of-my-own hopeful in me.)

I only ever met Grace Makosewe the one time. She was with Cess Mutungi and they had come to my local before it became my local . (Yes, the Porterhouse is, for all intents and purposes, my local.) They laughed a lot that night. They listened a lot too. Even to me though all I could think to say was that the Kambas can be found as far afield as Mozambique and the Seychelles. I never got to know her but I believe the generous woman who listened to the boring drunk in the corner spout rubbish about mercantile communities remained generous till the end.

I hope that wherever she is, Grace Makosewe has a mic in front of her making her new world as much a better place as she made ours here on Earth.

Green peace of mind

If you are the typical Nairobian, and if you are truly lucky, Nairobi is where you stay and work, but upcountry, shags, is where you truly come alive. Before I became a more or less permanent resident of the Green City in the Sun, I had been to New Delhi, Kolhapur, Accra, Sydney and Perth. I had also passed through Machakos. (Though, four years of schooling at Boys' doesn't seem much like "passing through," does it?) Today, I live and work in Nairobi, but in the fullness of time, when the public service deems my services no longer necessary and gives me a pension to toddle off, I shall settle in the land of my ancestors, God's Own Country, Makueni, on ten acres that will be my final, true home.

When Nairobi was the Green City in the Sun, no neighbourhood was bereft of green spaces; you didn't have to schlep to Uhuru Park or City Park to find trees. My 'hood, Buru Buru, had hundreds of fruit trees. The black plums in our court, Lacet Court, grew on trees that were (probably) twenty feet tall and as children, we spent a considerable portion of our school holidays climbing trees in search of zambarau. There were those courts that had mango trees, orange trees, passion fruit shrubs...all manner of greenery defined our childhoods. Today, Nairobi is mostly the City in the Sun, its green credentials slowly being erased by incessant "real estate development" and hideous billboards advertising odious products that do little to enrich our lives. (Only the Sportpesa and Betway promoters makes any real money.)

I've followed the #JacarandaPropaganda Twitter campaign with interest. It recalls a time when I was a child when my father and his neighbours joined hands to plant more trees in our hood. Those trees that they planted still stand to this day, offering shade in an increasingly sunny-as-hell Nairobi. I will be sad when that day comes and the last of the green spaces that we have taken for granted for so long are erased like so much has been erased that defined Nairobi.

Green spaces are more than the aesthetics or the environmental benefits they provide; green spaces are the civic spaces that becalm roiled emotions, that are accomplices to romantic assignations, that are the promise to future generations that it is not always about money. Green spaces are a signal that it is alright for children to come home with ripped jeans' knees and bright smiles of athletic accomplishment. (Tree-climbing is both an activity and an art form, good people.) Green spaces are a reminder that our lives are not defined by four walls and a computer monitor or spread sheets and bank balances. Green spaces are the souls that we are afraid we have lost to the all-consuming rat race. When they are gone, our souls will die a little and our days will be grimmer, harder, harsher, unforgiving and dark.

As Sunny Bindra says,

Trees and elephants and rivers and oceans and lakes are not ours to exploit. They are the gifts of divinity. They are what give meaning to human life. No monetary gain will help you when you look upon a barren ruin. Nature is our mother, and we must honour and protect her and let no one besmirch her beauty.

One day your rat race will end, your bank balance will return to zero, your computer monitor will go out for the last time, and your four-walled routine will cease. Don't let your retirement be an attempt to recreate these things; let it be filled with the peace and serenity that only nature can provide. (Just remember to keep as far away from leopards and hyenas; they don't play like that.)

Gayism and the Deputy Chief Justice

I don't know any gay people. (I don't know any openly gay people; I think I know a few closeted gay people.) I don't think it would matter if I knew a person were gay. It doesn't seem to matter that I know a person is straight. Yet the candidate for the office of Deputy Chief Justice and Deputy President of the Supreme Court is quoted as saying that she would need to know whether gayism was a matter of choice or it was in-born to deal with gayism. ("Gayism", as Senor Google reminds us, is homosexuality, the sexual orientation in which a person is romantically or sexually attracted to people of their own gender.)

(Gayism — homosexuality — is criminalised under the Penal Code of the laws of Kenya at sections 162 that declares "acts against the order of nature" to be felonies, 163 that criminalises attempts to commit acts against the order of nature and 165 that criminalises "indecent acts between males". The law on "gayism", as it were, is plain and requires no judicial inquiry as to whether the commission of the offence was innate or because of an act of free will. Whether consensual sexual acts should be criminalised in the first place remains a question that Kenya is unprepared to answer in full.)

In my relations and acquaintances, I struggle to identify instances where they are only coloured by whether or not those I encounter are sexual beings and if they are, what kinds of sexual beings they are. My relationship with my parents, siblings, cousins, nephews, grandparents, uncles or aunts is not a sexual one and I would be mortified to even entertain the question of whether or not they have sex and whom they are sexually attracted to. If you're as normal (and prudish) as I am, these are questions that should make you blush, dark skin that you are. Blush and blush mightily!

Of those I am acquainted with, of course there are those I have felt the frisson of excitement, the slight drop as if you're floating in zero-g, that rush you get when you think, How hot you are. It doesn't matter whether you're gay or straight, when you meet a person to whom you're instinctively and instantly attracted, the supercomputer that is your brain engages in a fantasy of how it would feel to kiss that person, take them to bed, hold them to your body. If you're normal, once more, your mind will swiftly discard these fantasies if it is not in your best interests to entertain them. Unless you're Donald J Trump, you're unlikely to continue fantasising about taking your boss to bed, co-workers, your significant other's siblings, parents, relatives, children or the like. Unless you have been raised to be guided only by your needs, to eschew all moral standards to which your community ascribes, that part of your brain that's sexually aroused will be overwhelmed by good judgment and, in some cases, shame.

Most of us interact withe each other on the basis of shared values, both professional and moral, and we apply these standards against each other without worrying too much as to whether they are innate or learned. If we knew someone who was a professional in all their undertakings, told the truth as much as we think we did, didn't cheat clients out of their money, brought the highest degree of professionalism to their assignments, was kind to children, the elderly and animals, would we really care if they were gay? I know I wouldn't. (I don't really know what I would do if a gay man hit on me. I don't really know if I would know that I was being hit on by a gay man. But if a gay man stole from me, lied to me about something other than his sexual orientation, or acted unprofessionally in an assignment, that I would mind. I would mind that quite mightily.)

As a judge, Philomena Mwilu has no choice but to determine a criminal accusation based on the provisions of the law, in this case the Penal Code. If an accused person advances a persuasive argument that sections 162, 163 and 165 of the Penal Code are unconstitutional, she wouldn't need to inquire as to whether the accused was born gay or chose to go gay. If it is true that she wishes to apply this criterion to the determination of criminal complaints — that is, whether or not a person was born to commit an offence or whether a person chose to commit an offence — then troubling questions about her judicial reasoning are raised and even more troubling questions about the capacity of the Judicial Service Commission to properly vet the suitability of applicants to the highest judicial offices in Kenya. 

The constitutionality of a law isn't based on the congenital characteristics of those who the law will regulate, administer or punish. The constitutionality of the law is, in this case, entirely about whether it safeguards the rights of the individual against the whim and caprice of the State. That Mwilu, J, seems to have forgotten this worries me. Mightily.

Two events, one thread

Two events this past week give me pause. The President stated that in the war on graft, he has done his part but that he has been failed by the police, the anti-corruption commission, the Attorney-General, the public prosecutor and the courts. Some members of his party, including an aspiring candidate for the office of member of the National Assembly, have decided to echo the president by declaring that it is indeed the courts that are responsible for the escalation in corruption, especially the corruption of the grand type.

The other even was the personal, harrowing description of an attempted robbery of a female commuter in a fourteen-seater matatu. She describes how a gang, operating with impunity and in cahoots with matatu crews, target female commuters using menaces, bladed weapons and drugs to rob them of their valuables in broad daylight and the sometimes seen-it-all attitude of some policemen when the offence is reported. Many have come out in her support while others have blamed her for being so obvious with her phone or her wallet. Both events highlight the same problems we have been trying to grapple with since the halcyon days of Yote yawezekana bila Moi: corruption and the impunity it has imbued on all Kenyans, not just the ones with the capacity to steal billions from public coffers.

The anti-corruption war should be fought on all fronts. Institutionally, we have the anti-corruption commission, the police, the DPP, the A-G, the Auditor-General and Parliament. The courts, never mind what the President and his boosters allege, is not part of that war. The judiciary's job, as it is in every other jurisdiction save maybe theocracies and dictatorships, is to weigh the evidence presented before it, examine the constitution and the relevant statutes, and render a verdict. The judiciary doesn't investigate crimes, sit doesn't arrest offenders and after passing sentence, it has nothing to do with the punishment of offenders. It could be corrupted; after all, it is made up of men and women and when its members become corrupt, they must be subjected too, to the same due process of the law: accusation, investigation, prosecution and conviction.

The corrupt act with impunity because they know that ever stage of the process has been corrupted or is seeded with corrupt actors. The same is true of criminal gangs robbing commuters in broad daylight. Few of them are afraid of being caught; they have the support of matatu crews and the apathy of bystanders unwilling to get involved. The one thing that connects the two events is the apathy of the people. So many promises have been broken and our trust has been so taken for granted that we are no longer interested in sticking our necks out for a good cause.

Otherwise sensible Kenyans have even taken their nihilism to extreme ends. One even once argued that corruption could actually be a force for good! It seems that the only currency that matters in Kenya today is great political power backed by billions of shillings in wealth. The common good is what the politician says it is and not whether or not it has the consent of the governed. Frequently what the politician calls the common good serves only the politician. It is why police resources are overwhelmingly deployed to protect the politician and not the people. It is how the politician will not speak about the necessity for a safe public transport sector; only of the employment that it guarantees his constituents.

All about process

The court is the last stage before a person, accused of an offence, is convicted and sentenced — or acquitted and set at liberty. The process begins when a person is accused of having committed an offence as defined by an Act of Parliament. Yesterday key actors in the war on corruption presented themselves at State House, Nairobi, and spent the hours between 7 a.m. and the lunchtime news broadcast at 1 p.m. passing the buck like it was a hot potato in their hands.

The chief executive of the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission said that it doesn't prosecute or jail corruption suspects; the Director of Public Prosecutions said that he could only approach the courts if the evidence and witnesses were provided by the police; the Director of Criminal Investigations said that the police mostly receive allegations that cannot stand in court and that the police do their part while others don't; and the Attorney-General hilariously blamed the judiciary for stalling cases through "dubious" injunctions.

The process always begins with an accusation or allegation. It can be made to the police, the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Office of the Attorney-General. The accusation must always be founded on a keen reading of the relevant provision of the law. In any case, it is the police that shall investigate, gather evidence, interview witnesses and present its report to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The DPP will review the case file. If the DPP believes that an offence has been committed and that the evidence and witness statements support that belief, the DPP will approach the courts and charge the suspected offender with the offence. The police investigation and the DPP's review of the case file are the cornerstones of the process of trying corruption offences. If the investigation is flawed or if the DPP's review is defective, the trail may only lead to one outcome: the acquittal of the accused.

Contrary to what the A-G believes, injunctions are not an inconvenience that can be wished away simply because they appear to be of dubious character; they are provided for in the law. It is not for the accused to give an inch when accused of an offence; it is for the DPP and the police to mount the most robust case and to challenge every application for an injunction with clarity and vigour.  That they have proven incapable or unwilling to do their part in corruption case after corruption case is not the fault of magistrates or judges. Unless the A-G can show that the injunctions granted by the courts had no foundation in the law, the declaration that they are "dubious" raises questions of its own about the role of the A-G in these fraught prosecutions.

The courts will issues injunctions and preside over trials based n the provisions of law and evidence adduced. Lazy judges or magistrates who allow their faith in Jesus or their cultural values to interfere with the proper interpretation of the law or assessment of evidence should be shown the door; they can teach penmanship or grammar some place other than on the Bench. There is a reason why the doctrine of separation of powers is gaining currency in Kenya; no one wants a repeat of the Moi era where the courts and the A-G were the president's lackeys and the rule of law was a cute legal doctrine law students were taught to forget as soon as they were called to the Bar. The A-G can criticise genuinely unwarranted injunctions but the only way he can prevail before judges or magistrates is by presenting a better case. Can he? Can the DPP? Will the police ever? You guess is as good as mine.

Welcome, Chief Justice.

David Maraga has been sworn in as the Chief Justice and Supreme Court has a new president. At the ceremony, the President urged the new Chief Justice to forge better relationships between the judiciary and the other arms of government while the fourteenth head of Kenya's judiciary promises to deal with election petitions swiftly, surely and fairly. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

One of the things that the thirteenth Chief Justice admitted to have failed to conquer was corruption, including in his Supreme Court. When he described Kenya as a bandit economy, he didn't do so in the context of a judiciary that was white as the driven snow. He made the declaration before the Philip Tunoi affidavit became public knowledge, as the Judicial Service Commission worked to confirm the veracity of the affidavit and the charges it laid at the feet of the new-retired Supreme Court judge. Dr Mutunga knew that corruption had hobbled the judiciary and had helped perpetuate the banditry that defined all arms of government.

Chief Justice Maraga's swearing in took place one day after a "governance and accountability" service that took place at State House at which the President scoffed at the efforts of the Auditor-General regarding the 2014 Eurobond. The President reminded the attendees of the summit that he has not failed at stopping corruption in his government; it is the people he had invited to the summit who had failed, when they protected and supported the corrupt. Chief Justice Maraga inherits Dr Mutunga's corrupted judiciary, perhaps a corrupted Supreme Court, and he is urged to forge better relationships by the Head of Government who admits no defeat in the war on corruption. (It almost goes without saying that Parliament and county assemblies cannot be trusted to be corruption-free zones.)

Yet, I care not for the corruption of the judiciary or any other arm of government. Kenya has been at this dance for too long. Life is short, so I shall focus on the judicial things that matter to me. Chief Justice Maraga is not a child, thank God, and he is unlikely to act as one. During his interviews, on hindsight, he conducted himself with a certain calm dignity that I found impressive. He was unflappable and didn't seem to take to heart the needling by some members of the Commission, unlike at least one other interviewee who ended up in a spitting match with a colleague of his on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Maraga, on the face of it, is the calm the judiciary needs in increasingly roiled waters.

What some commentators have projected on him is interesting too. Dr Mutunga brought with him a non-traditional approach to public relations. He attempted to lead in the demystification of the judiciary which he signalled with the green robes and a casual approach to robing for advocates appearing before the Supreme Court. (Something I supported; horsehair wigs and advocates robes are not the measure of professionalism in a fast-paced, digital world.) Chief Justice Maraga may reverse the changes initiated by Dr Mutunga but I hope he does not. Instead he should deepen the relationship between the judiciary and court users, especially civilian members of the public. It is the only way that he can expect the support of the public for some unpopular decisions which he will inevitably have to make.

I hope he does forge better relations with the other arms of government, especially the national Executive. But he must be careful that this relationship is not an unhealthy one in which the whims and caprices of the national Executive compromise whatever vestiges of justice and fairness that still prevail in the judiciary. Finally, the new Chief Justice must be careful not to focus on colonial traditions at the expense of justice for the people. Wigs and robes are all well and good but they are not the sum or substance of the administration of justice. That remains, as it always has, a factor of the proper interpretation of the law and its fair application no matter the standing of the litigants before the courts. Sir, don't miss the forest for the trees.