Narc’s dark first year should give UhuRuto hope, but is there a plan?

One year after President Kibaki came into office, there was only gloom and doom abroad in the land. The coalition that brought him to power was tearing itself apart over the Bomas constitutional conference.

“Narc chiefs face stormy meeting at Awori’s house,” the Nation reported on January 4, 2004, a year to the week when Mr Kibaki was sworn in, describing severe intra-coalition tensions and an attempt to broker peace by Narc summit head Moody Awori.

Lecturers were on strike. In an op/ed in the Nation on January 2, 2004, Prof James ole Kiyiapi, at the time a senior lecturer at Moi University, lamented the “primitive” tactics the government had applied in dealing with the strike, including cutting off lecturers’ salaries.

The president was sick. In a country that had grown used to the highly visible President Moi, Mr Kibaki was out of view and there were whispers everywhere over who was truly in charge.

Sample two headlines in the Nation that month: “Kibaki must avoid stressing fracture” (25/01/2004) and “The kind of treatment that Nairobi hospital gives a head of state” (26/1/2004).

Mr Kibaki was not helping matters with his chaotic domestic arrangements. The “one family” statement had become the fodder for jokes in Kenya and beyond.

“They love our war of the wives,” Charles Onyango-Obbo chortled, reporting on the fascination with the saga around East Africa.

Most importantly, the economy was limping. One of the first things Narc did was to raise the salaries of teachers and policemen (and MPs, of course) and the government was struggling to balance the books.

In an article headlined “The economy’s simply not working” in the second week of October 2003, a respected economics commentator pointed out that everything seemed to be going wrong.

Interest rates had plunged massively, with mortgages going for 12 per cent down from nearly double that level yet an uncertain private sector was hesitant to borrow and a broke government was taking huge loans.

“You cannot grow when you borrow the economy’s savings to pay salaries,” he wrote.

PLAN

As we now know, Narc had a plan and many of the players in that government knew what they were doing.

A month after the gloom of January 2004, John Michuki unleashed the public transport regulations which were a major psychological milestone in showing wananchi that things had changed and a new way of doing things had to be embraced.

The banks – after throwing tantrums and claiming they would invest in treasury bills in Uganda and Tanzania – climbed down and lent to the private sector, unlocking a surge of business activity.

By 2006, the economy was growing at rates last seen decades before. In the Sunday Nation edition of October 12, 2003, a confident Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o had written a rejoinder to the gloomy analysis of Narc’s first few months in power and counselled patience.

He offered a highly sophisticated understanding of the problems inherited by Narc and the way forward for the economy. Narc had a blueprint. The Economic Recovery Strategy, Prof Nyong’o noted, was not a short term appeal for aid but a long-term agenda to breathe new life in the economy.

Time proved him right. Does the UhuRuto team have a similarly carefully thought out plan? Will they stick with their ambitious initiatives – delivering the railway on time in 2017 and the million-acre irrigation project? Or rather than having strategic goals are they just tacticians panicking after each crisis comes up? Time will tell. But they might want to read the words of Prof Nyong’o in his article where, with a trademark touch of arrogance and unerring confidence, he predicted that Narc would eventually come good:

“The government cannot afford to ignore the scepticism and air of disappointment that characterises media writing and bar talk. The jaded comments can only be overcome by government’s credibility and predictability.

The past nine months are just the beginning. I would urge the sceptics and cynics to give us room to establish our credibility through actual accomplishments in the days to come. It may take as many as five years before the results are clearly evident.”

Can UhuRuto make a similar claim? One hopes for Kenya’s sake that they have a plan.

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