All Kenyans who wish to live better lives, and most do, would want to believe that, since Uhuru and Ruto want to last in power for 20 years, they have the capacity, the will and the desire to develop Kenya and her people before all else. But after Uhuru and Ruto’s stay in power for the last two years, it is hard to now say that the duo are able, committed and determined to put Kenya’s development before their own goal to retain and use power to maximize their own personal gains.
But if Kenyans don’t want to live with their heads buried in the sand, waiting for development that may never come, they must accept that for Uhuru to take Kenyans to the Promised Land from the desert where his father Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki left most Kenyans, he must demonstrate a vision to do everything possible and in his power to ensure Kenya develops, something he has not so far demonstrated. In fact, rather than demonstrate ultimate determination to develop Kenya, foresighted Kenyans now see a President Uhuru whose desire is first and foremost to retain and enjoy power as much as he can with his friends and ordinary people may pick crumbs that fall from his feasting table. To facilitate this vision, certain things can be observed from his style of governance.
First and foremost, Uhuru’s and Ruto’s stated ideology was it was time for youthful leaders to eat whether they qualified to be in government or not.
Because the ideology of eating does not make younger people better than old people, Uhuru ended up appointing and helping to get elected into his government and parliament, people who faces are new and young but have old minds, only capable of churning out same old ideas that their old predecessors had for Kenya.
Other than having a young face but old mind, President Uhuru seems to believe that because he was elected to head government, government is personal property of the president that he is free and entitled to use for personal, friends’, family’s, cronies’ and sycophants’ aggrandizement.
But if we want to give President Uhuru the benefit of doubt and assume he sought power because he intended the best for Kenya, we must conclude that the president then lacks the fire to do the best he can to develop Kenya and her people, because he is a prisoner of forces that helped him to acquire power, and now exercise power through president.
With Uhuru’s dismal handling of security matters, his total failure to fight corruption or exclude the corrupt from government and his inability to extricate himself from dictates of negative ethnicity when making policy decisions and appointing people into his government, it is obvious president’s advisors have and can only mislead him into destroying Kenya, yet he seems unable to sack them or extract better advice from them.
So far, instead of President Uhuru using his 2 years in power to lay a foundation for the country’s great future through industrialization and development that is impossible in a country that is a captive of both corruption and negative ethnicity, President Uhuru seems to be laying a foundation for ruin or total paralysis of the country,
Indeed, who would doubt Kenya’s future paralysis after looking at the list of President Uhuru’s recent appointments into his cabinet, government corporations and departments that included scions of rich and famous political families, ethnic dynasties, political cronies and outright sycophants?
Whether we like it or not, no country can develop if people whose only qualification and merit is their closeness to the president and whose only desire is to fleece and eat from government corporations, ministries, departments and institutions they are put in charge of.
How can anybody look at the list of presidential appointments and feel inspired that the President has now put the country into the hands of engineers and pilots who will launch the country’s economic spaceship into the First World?
How can people who are appointed into government and government corporations to mobilize ethnic communities to support the president and eat from allowances, per diems and bribes for tenders develop the country?
President Uhuru is the CEO of this country. His Primary business is to organize the government to protect and develop the country, not to benefit particular leaders and individuals. But to do both, the President must rely on merit to pick those people the government will depend upon to protect and develop the country. Unfortunately merit has been replaced with ethnicity, friendship, loyalty, gratitude and family. How then can we hope and expect to develop?
When recently the president announced the list of those who are being investigated for corruption by Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, I thought there was hope that the President had finally decided to lead the war against corruption. Now I think otherwise. Fighting corruption is ending carnivore-ism in the human jungle.
To fight meat eating however, the president must be a grass not meat eater. When I look at the president and his political associates however, I am convinced that politically, he is a meat eater unless he proves otherwise and cannot therefore be relied upon to fight grand graft in Kenya.
In the final analysis, Kenyans who expect President Uhuru to develop this country are day dreaming. For development, Kenyans must look elsewhere for leadership. Too bad!
BY KOIGI WA WAMWERE
