Jubilee scores poorly in first eight months

When the history of the Jubilee government is finally written, will Mr Uhuru Kenyatta turn the pages on his first year in office with a smile or hang his head in shame at the cacophony of missteps cataloguing his early months as Kenya’s fourth president?

It may be too early to judge this government, but if the past eight months are a pointer to the future, President Kenyatta will have a lot to be embarrassed about, and little to be proud of. Why?

His MPs have turned their majority in Parliament into a curse of our elections.

With the help of the President they have assaulted press freedom, attempted to strangle the civil society, gutted independent commissions and turned the august House into a bastion of incompetence.

When MPs are not devaluing our nationhood, they are robbing  the economy by raising their salaries and scavenging for allowances through the so-called committee sittings where profiteering is the password.

Perhaps the threshold for shame is too low in Parliament, but this is no licence to behave as if we are a country of zombies.

The security agencies are in a shambles. The fiasco that was Westgate rescue is still raw in our minds.

The police seem overwhelmed by runaway crime, our roads have become deathtraps and terrorists attack almost at will in the city and northern Kenya.

We expected the government would come up with a coherent strategy to address this.

Instead the military is being deployed to do police chores, duplicating the mandate of the agencies even further and being given a role it is neither trained nor equipped to handle.

Whether by default or not, national institutions are fast losing the confidence of Kenyans. Recent polls indicate that the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary are no longer trusted by Kenyans. Almost 70 per cent of citizens think the country is headed to the dogs.

The instinctive reaction of a discerning leadership would have been to sit up and remedy the situation. But will President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto? Or will they only read mischief in such surveys?

Matters are not helped by the fact that the so-called technocratic Cabinet has been clueless to say the least. Bar none, the Cabinet Secretaries seem overwhelmed by the call of duty.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that some civil servants are running a parallel government. The problem is not that we have a rogue civil service, as some State House operatives claimed last week, but the bureaucracy is rudderless.

The Principal Secretaries, too, are ineffective, groping in the darkness for clues on leadership. The public seem to be paying a high price for appointments that rewarded loyalty above merit.

Yet it has not been all gloom. Devolution was always going to be a headache, but it has proceeded well so far. There have been deliberate attempts to boost infrastructure and a lot of talk about economic growth with little action to match.

A lot of national resources have been thrown at managing the cases at The Hague. There have been a few victories for Mr Kenyatta and many humiliations for Kenya in the courts, but the bureaucrats have not despaired.

Four years is a long time to mend a reputation. The challenge now is to expend at least as much effort towards securing far more important national policy interests than just the freedom of two men.