Senate will become laughing stock if it entertains impeachment bid on Kivutha

Calls for reconciliation as the solution to the Makueni County mess pitting Governor Kivutha Kibwana and the County Assembly members are, in the main, well-meaning.

However, they are unrealistic.

It is too late in the day to entertain hopes of reconciliation.

Just the bile on display from the combatants, and the body language, says it all.

It shouldn’t have come to this if Ukambani’s topmost leadership was up to par.

I am talking about the Wiper Party, the dominant force there, and specifically the leadership – or lack of it – of Kalonzo Musyoka.

As shootings and brawls and impeachments and threats of county dissolution fly all over the place, Mr Musyoka has chosen to travel the world.

Britain. Malaysia. India. Namibia. Lately he has been in South Africa.

En route there, he made a brief stopover in Kenya when the Makueni crisis was raging. Nobody knows for certain what efforts he undertook to resolve it.

I cannot imagine Uhuru Kenyatta or Raila Odinga tolerating such embarrassing confusion in their core constituencies.

That used to be Mwai Kibaki’s style.

To be fair, Mr Musyoka has been issuing occasional statements about reconciliation in Makueni. They have been feeble, though.

The fact that Wiper MCAs who control the Makueni County Assembly have ignored his half-hearted entreaties only demonstrates his lack of control in his own powerbase.

There have been two substantive attempts so far at reconciliation. One was by Kitui Senator David Musila jointly with Kitui Governor Julius Malombe and his Machakos counterpart Alfred Mutua. The other was by a council of Kamba elders.

They recently met at Maanzoni Lodge in Machakos County where they issued a series of resolutions, which the warring sides ignored.

Mr Musyoka did not find it profitable to interrupt his grand travels to attend any of the meetings.

Prof Kibwana may be handling governance in Makueni from an academic point of view (as he has been accused), but my groundwork has convinced me he is genuinely popular there.

If fresh county elections are held as he is pushing for, he will definitely get re-elected.

The same cannot be said of the rapacious MCAs who want him out.

After travelling extensively across Ukambani in the company of a local friend, the impression I formed was that Mr Musila, who is the deputy Wiper leader, could give the party more gravitas in its stronghold than the current leader.

He is stolid and dependable, though not particularly dazzling.

As for Dr Mutua, the political star of the region, he is in Wiper only in name.

His heart seems to be no longer there. What he aims for is clearly beyond Ukambani.

Johnstone Muthama, the Machakos senator, was reported in the papers last week claiming that the problems in Makueni have been cooked by Jubilee. It is a good rule of thumb to ignore the senator’s ranting.

SEES JUBILEE HAND

First of all, Jubilee does not have a single elected MCA in the Makueni Assembly.

The MPs and the local senator who have ganged up against the governor are all in Wiper, or parties affiliated to it.

The governor himself is from one such party.

For some reason, Prof Kibwana seems to agree with the senator about a Jubilee hand which, in his case, he sees coming through the Makueni County Assembly speaker, who is a member of URP.

Yet, it would be quite a feat for URP, which has its own problems, to bribe the entire County Assembly and all the elected Makueni MPs to oust the governor.

Nor would any party gain glamour by having in its ranks such a disagreeable fellow as the Makueni speaker has turned out to be.

My own assessment of the myriad accusations levelled against Prof Kibwana is that they don’t merit impeachment.

They are mainly about administrative and procedural missteps, not of a corrupt and criminal enterprise the governor is presumed to be presiding over.

So what if the governor’s wife had an “unauthorised lunch” at the Panafric?

And that she sometimes rides in a county car? The Senate will become a laughing stock if it entertains this impeachment bid.

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