{UAH} UHURUTO: STUMBLING FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS | The Star

http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-130604/uhuruto-stumbling-crisis-crisis

Like the Russian people at the start of their Revolution in the second decade of the 20th Century, Kenyans have entered a phase in their political history when the ordinary person is being flattered with a new importance from all sides of the political divide. And yet all existing politico-socio-economic fissures appear to be not only opening up but widening.

The late American historian Theodore H. Von Laue, the son of Max Von Laue, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and author of the controversial 1987 study The World Revolution of Westernization, went on in his magisterial analysis of the Russian Revolution:

"The western democratic values in the programmes of the parties now holding sway were broadcast as a thousand tiny explosives shattering old habits of submission or apathy. Every view, every feeling hitherto unnoted became articulate and called for action. After March [1917] Russia thus witnessed a gigantic awakening of heady political fantasies. Old hopes and resentments were mobilized and reinforced by present hardships of hunger, cold, uncertainty, and a thousand frustrations. Out of this awakening, a new age of rampant political spontaneity was born".

There has been dark talk of revolution in the making lately in Kenya, mostly from certain investigative organs of the Jubilee Coalition Government of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto. And there have been loud denials from the Opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka.

GIGANTIC POLITICAL AWAKENING

What has not been in doubt throughout the political sector and all other sectors in Kenya is the fact that this country is indeed in the grip of a gigantic political awakening.

As the new Constitution kicks in, complete with the rolling out of Devolution, the Kenyan Presidency is suddenly not only a very lonely place but its occupants are in uncharted territory, quite apart from their predicament at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.

In the course of barely a month, a number of Cabinet secretaries have been confronted by, or have themselves uttered, a number of unprecedented things.

First came Transport and Infrastructure Secretary Michael Kamau's extraordinary criticism of the National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS) on July 9, accusing the secret police of "lacking strategic thinking" and descending into an obsession with cloak-and-dagger ways at the expense of other critical national strategic interests.

Kamau was referring specifically to Kenya's intervention in Somalia as part of the US-led War on Terror.

And then, in the penultimate week of July, came the incident at the Kisii mass funeral service for victims of a school bus crash, on Tuesday the 23rd, at which Information and Communications Technology Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i and presidential adviser Prof Sam Ongeri were roundly booed and prevented from delivering President Kenyatta's message of condolences and KSh700,000 donation to the bereaved.

Instead, the gathering cheered Raila, with the person manning the public address system referring to him as "Baba yetu" (our father). When Government Spokesman Muthui Kariuki moved to Matiang'i and Ongeri's defence, and, by extension, the Presidency's, Cord reacted massively, complete with news conferences in Nairobi and Mombasa.

The dust had barely settled over the Kariuki-Cord spat when, over the weekend of July 27-28, came news of Agriculture Secretary Felix Koskei looking on as irate farmers walked out of a meeting he had convened in Eldoret, when he peremptorily rejected almost all the demands they had tabled for him to address and instead blamed the producers for the problems in the industry.

Koskei told the farmers that they should address most of their complaints to the county government. "You have been crying for a long time as farmers. It's because you address issues the wrong way", he said.

They showed him their broad backs.

EJECTION OF STATE OFFICIALS

The same weekend, senior government officers were forced to flee for safety after angry residents of Narasha in Naivasha attacked them, damaging vehicles.

A high-powered delegation comprising Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security Joseph ole Lenku and Cabinet Secretary for Energy Davies Chirchir looked on open-mouthed as angry Maasai families forcibly expelled high administrative and security officials, almost all of them armed, from a prayer meeting.

Also present, and stunned, were Principal Secretaries Mutea Iringo (Internal Security), Joseph Njoroge (Energy) and John Konchellah (Devolution).

The ejected officers included former Rift Valley PC Osman Warfa. In a thoroughly abject scene captured on video on prime-time TV news, they fled on foot and dived headlong into their vehicles, speeding away as angry residents wielding clubs and spears gave chase, smashing a number of windscreens.

The outraged residents were protesting the violent eviction of scores of families from land reportedly earmarked for the Ken Gen Company.

The demolitions were carried out by gangs of hired youth backed by heavily-armed Administration Police officers. Prime-time TV footage on multiple channels showed scenes of wanton destruction, burning shacks and stranded mothers, children and livestock.

On Monday, a Nakuru News Online blogger reported:

"CID Director Ndegwa Muhoro was this morning spotted in Nakuru town in the company of Provincial Police Chief Levin Mwendi.

"Police and county government administrators are tight-lipped about Muhoro's mission but speculation is that he is here to unearth circumstances under which senior government officers were forced to flee for safety after angry residents of Narasha in Naivasha attacked them damaging their vehicles yesterday".

The CID has in recent weeks summoned Raila aide Eliud Owalo in an 11-point investigation in which it is alleged that he is at an advanced stage of fomenting revolution and Arab Spring-style uprisings in Kenya.

Interior Secretary ole Lenku was a busy man that weekend. The previous day in Kwale, with Kariuki being among those who flanked him, he flatly contradicted the Government Spokesman's version of events regarding Raila not having returned six vehicles to the State after stepping down from the premiership. Ole Lenku also went out of his way to urge Kenyans to show Raila every respect as a retired statesman. Kariuki grinned and bore it as Raila's supporters wondered where ole Lenku was coming from by seeming to defend the former PM while at the same time categorizing him as "retired" from politics.

While all this was going on, both the Jubilee Government's and media attentions were also captured by an unprecedented retreat in Dallas, Texas, of Kenyan leaders led by Raila. Dubbed the Kenya Governor's Conference, the symposium was attended by 10 Cord County governors.

RAILA IN AMERICA

The Government and its security networks looked on suspiciously as the international retreat, organised by the Network for Development of Youth in partnership with Summers Dodge International Group under the theme "Strategic Vision for Good Governance", went on. Kenya's acting Ambassador in Washington, Ms Jean Kamau, told reporters that the mission was unaware of the event and had no comment to make.

Back in Nairobi, a remark of Raila's in Dallas quietly but seriously ruffled feathers at the centre of the Jubilee Government:

"People should be told that we now have 47 county governments. They do not need any person from another government to run their affairs".

Kariuki told this correspondent that when Raila uses a phrase like "any person from another government", he "seeks to diminish and demean, perhaps even endanger, a whole raft of Central Government officials on duty delivering services to the people throughout the Republic". Kariuki invoked the Constitution of Kenya 2010, at Chapter 2, The Republic (5, 6), defines the Territory of Kenya (5) and Devolution and Access to Services (6) in a planned rapid response to Raila, but then stayed his hand, perhaps recalling the severe rap on his wrist at Kwale by ole Lenku.

Still on American soil, Raila also faulted the Jubilee Government for not making "appointments that reflect the Face of Kenya".

"How can you make 60 per cent of Cabinet appointments from two tribes and claim they represent the face of Kenya?" he asked.

There were other signs of ferment and simmering discontent, including in such unlikely places as Jubilee strongholds like the Eldoret incident already noted. The spectacle of miraa (khat) traders from Meru loudly and rowdily rejecting an attempt by the region's politicians to be enjoined in a case at the High Court which they have filed to protest the banning of the crop by Britain and a number of other EU nations, was a major slap in the face for the Jubilee administration.

But the signature events of a terrible week for Jubilee were the Makueni by-election, in which the people of this arid and semi-arid (Asal) region delivered a kick to the teeth of Government with both feet, and the twin-threats by doctors and lecturers to go on strike.

Coming hard on the heels of the teachers' strike, the medics and academics' industrial action will only add fuel to the fire of the growing perception of national malaise s early in an administration that rode into office on pledges of transformative change.

As Kenyan blogger Betty Waitherero crowed on her INCREDIBLE KENYA site on Tuesday July 30, in a post that was taken down the same day, a million children were enrolled in primary school in Mwai Kibaki's first 100 days in office while all children were out of school for weeks on end during President Kenyatta II's first 100.

THE ONE-TERM TRAP

The President seems to have taken some time off since just before the Kisii mass funeral service, with the Deputy President handling a rather busy schedule, including the key meeting with Jubilee governors where he came face-to-face with Council of Governors Chairman and incipient URP rebel Isaac Rutto, and an international conference on the Great Lakes' region.

Perhaps President Kenyatta II is pondering the strange mood abroad in the nation, on top of Raila Odinga's every move.

No other President of Kenya, incoming, has been faced with such a multiplicity of burning issues, such a groundswell of expectations – reasonable, unreasonable and right out of the ballpark.

Perhaps he should ponder another piercing observation by Prof Von Laue about the long-ago Russian Revolution:

"Everybody now spoke his mind, bluntly and imperiously as had been the custom of the authorities in the past. The resulting cacophony revealed how weak under the autocratic monolith had remained the bonds of community and how small the fund of political rationality. The conservatives, to be sure, lay low for a while; their Russia was discredited. All the others pressed their claims on each other fortissimo: manufacturers and workers, landlords and peasants, liberals and socialists, moderates and extremists, Russians and non-Russians (sometimes the non-Russians among themselves), Christians and Jews, fathers and sons. The arguments soon ceased to be reasonable. Everywhere one could detect a penchant for maximalism, an irresistible urge to go to the limit".

The smallness of Kenya's fund of political rationality, the growing, and growling, penchant for maximalism, are things Uhuru probably never reckoned he would one day stare in the face from the throne of the Presidency. He has gone way out of his way to project to Kenyans the image of a friendly face of the Presidency such as they have rarely seen since the advent of Daniel arap Moi, his Dad's successor at State House, in late 1978.

The early President Moi, 34 years younger than his predecessor (Uhuru is 29 years younger than Mwai Kibaki), started off with what looked like a collegiate Presidency, even inviting his political buddies Charles Mugane Njonjo and Geoffrey Gitahi (GG) Kariuki for rides in the stretch State limo. Moi even wept copiously, seated on the VIP dais, when he was told what National Youth Service (NYS) servicemen and women earned at the time, upon which he promptly decreed an increase in the allowances.

It did not go unnoticed that Uhuru met Moi not once but twice between March, 2013, when he was president-elect, and June, within his first 100 days in office. It is even being significantly whispered that it was after an encounter with Moi that Uhuru went for the hardball option with the strike teachers.

However, 1978 is a long time ago and practically another country and world. The incoming Moi surveyed a country of barely 15 million people under a one-party state and in a Cold War context on the global stage. Moi's Kenya, like the old Russia on the cusp of the Revolution, is now largely discredited.

President Kenyatta II is practically on another planet. He surveys a country of more than 40 million under a multiparty system that has divided them right down the middle and a global stage where the US is the sole superpower led by a one-generation-removed roots-in-Luo-Nyanza President, born only two-and-a-half months before him in 1961, but they are barely on speaking terms.

Uhuru has much less room for manoeuvre, both locally and internationally, than his three predecessors, to morph from a friendly, even sometimes informal, national CEO into a stern-faced autocrat at the centre of an implacable national security state.

True, there are many things he and his handlers do not like about the new constitutional dispensation, including police reforms they clearly view as being too closely cast in the image of civil society for comfort.

However, what has happened to a number of his Cabinet secretaries, regional administrators and senior security officials in recent weeks has the political class on all sides looking on wryly, even ironically. Technocrat Cabinet secretaries without previous experience of addressing either charged public barazas or momentous news conferences are being quickly perceived as remote, ivory-tower individuals who owe voters nothing. More incidents of cold-shouldering, heckling and even physical ejection from the venues of public encounters could well become routine in the near-future.

And while there is no doubt that Raila Odinga will add fuel to the fire of any dysfunction, dissonance and shortcoming of the Jubilee regime, ultimately Kenya is such a reform construction site just now, such a sheer laboratory of new ways of doing things, that the greatest danger UhuRuto face is that of being locked into only a one-term Presidency.

Flattered with a new importance, particularly by the Devolution project, and with all existing politico-socio-economic fissures not only opening up but widening, Kenyans might well be in a mood to experiment until they find a fit they could live with for a considerable while.

Given such dynamics, the Jubilee Coalition could well be the first of a long line of one-term presidencies in this country.

UHURUTO: STUMBLING FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS | The Star
http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-130604/uhuruto-stumbling-crisis-crisis