Uhuru’s ‘Hakuna Matata’ leadership style unravels in Garissa response

Kenyans have been understandably angry at President Uhuru Kenyatta’s apparent aloofness in the wake of the Garissa University massacre.

Even in the Godforsaken Somalia, where nervous government officials work from the relative safety of a fortified camp, citizens would still expect their president to brave the flying terrorist bombs and come out to comfort the victims in the event of an attack of such magnitude.

Well, on Thursday Mr Kenyatta’s publicists sought to demonstrate that their boss isn’t that cold-hearted by dispatching pictures of him signing personal condolence letters to the bereaved families from behind his office desk at State House, Nairobi.

The timing of the letter signing – coming after the Daily Nation’s no-holds-barred editorial that put the President on the spotlight and also got out the First Lady to visit the Chiromo Mortuary – provides fodder for haters and admirers to have a go at each other in the coming days.

But what is likely to be lost in the partisan din is the hint of an unravelling leadership style that has particularly been strong at times of national crisis.

With the benefit of hindsight, the President can be accused of anything but indifference despite the distance he has kept from the mourning families at Chiromo or the recuperating victims at Kenyatta National Hospital.

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For it was Mr Kenyatta who, as opposition leader in 2004, voiced his distaste for aloofness in that famous put-down, terming then President Mwai Kibaki’s leadership style “hands off, eyes off, feet off, everything off”.

And, in the wake of the Garissa attack, the government’s presence has been somehow felt with a number of Cabinet secretaries on the ground to coordinate the disaster management, the Kenya Air Force fighter jets reportedly bombing al-Shabaab bases in Somalia and the suspected terrorism financiers having their accounts frozen.

But if Mr Kenyatta’s leadership style isn’t quite “hands off”, his tendency to try to look cool in the face of major crises rather than step forward to personally rally a national response has some lazy, ‘Hakuna Matata’ (no-worries) feel about it.

The style was perhaps best displayed back in November last year when reports emerged that the President stayed on in Abu Dhabi to watch a Formula One race on the day al-Shabaab terrorists killed 28 Kenyans in Mandera.

The ‘Hakuna Matata’ phrase, popularised by the local band Them Mushrooms through the song Jambo Bwana and the American film The Lion King, has long been used to promote Kenya’s hospitality industry and no effort should be spared to make everyone feel safe in the country.

But in the face of terrorist threats lurking all over, it is out of tune and its echoes in the President’s leadership style will shake Kenyans’ sense of security.

Otieno Otieno is chief sub-editor, Business Daily. [email protected]; @otienootieno