Mr President, don’t relent on graft, and your place in posterity is assured
What you need to know:
- The President should not lose heart. The public is with him on this war. He must win it.
Hail to the Chief! I can’t recall any other time when a presidential address received a standing ovation in our Parliament. Not once, not twice, but thrice. The public reactions were no less euphoric.
Uhuru Kenyatta can give a mean speech. That’s for sure. It had become clear even to the youngsters to whom he once promised laptops that corruption was the beast that was eating into Jubilee and scuttling any chance of a second term.
Kudos, for he finally rose to the occasion.
The naysayers, as usual, were quick off the mark. The first lot of professional whiners who termed the President’s gesture as meaningless can be briskly dismissed.
But I agree with the other batch that conceded that a bold step had been taken, and what must come next is action.
The proof of the pudding is indeed in the eating.
There is the other bunch of nitpickers who chose to split hairs on procedural questions rather than confront the substance of what the President was trying to do.
Why was he giving directives on a matter that should have been left to the EACC? Isn’t the commission supposed to be independent of the Executive? Why was the President giving timelines to the Director of Public Prosecutions? And so on and so forth.
ULTIMATUM
This group, which is populated by the familiar NGO types, happens to be the loudest in attacking the Executive for tolerating corruption.
They had even given the President a week-long ultimatum, though I found them laughably naïve in entertaining the notion Uhuru Kenyatta had them in mind when he gave his orders on Thursday.
Yet whenever proactive action is taken, the activists rush to rubbish everything because some arcane technicalities were not followed.
Pray, why was their ultimatum not directed at the EACC if they now feel the President should have played a peripheral role?
These NGO squads should put their money where their mouths are. If they think EACC was compromised, let them initiate a petition to dissolve it.
Let us see how they will stand up to the public backlash if the cases the EACC was asked to speedily prosecute go up in smoke as a result.
I dwell on the faultfinders for some length because their carping can tie up the war against graft. Nothing was moving. Everything had stalled.
The EACC was tearing itself apart with internal rifts just when Anglo Leasing cases were meant to be brought to closure.
It is instructive the President made it clear he was acting on a confidential report prepared by the CEO and the Secretariat, not from the dubious commissioners who are already facing a petition for removal before a committee of Parliament.
I like the 60-day deadline the President has given for all the cases to be concluded. I don’t know if the EACC has the capacity to handle the sudden torrent of cases all at once or whether it will require assistance from other agencies like the CID or the police.
Whatever happens, these cases must be prosecuted quickly and those guilty punished. The country is crying for no less.
The DPP and the courts will get very busy. Still, I fear the courts could turn out to be the weak link in the chain. Will they respect the President’s timelines? Or will we be back to the nonsense of cases getting tied up forever in injunctions, counter-injunctions and what have you?
Already, the lawyers are salivating over the looming windfall. The road ahead will be quite rough. The fingered governors have promptly vowed not to resign. The named MPs are certain to dig in, too. Their lawyers will be all over town with the legalese that elected leaders fall under different rules.
However, the President should not lose heart. The public is with him in this war. He must win it.
