Questions Uhuru failed to answer in national address

What you need to know:

  • The Jubilee administration has not completed 1,950km of road.
  • We do not have 7,000km of road under construction.

President Uhuru Kenyatta took a break from his brawling with governors to read what may be his final State of the Nation address. The State of the Nation ought to be, but has not been, one of the highlights of his presidency. When history is written, one among his many unedifying records will be his having fallen far short of the standard that the inaugural president of the 2010 Constitution ought to have set for the State of the Nation address in terms of sense of occasion, decorum and content.

Seeing as this could well be his last address, it was reasonable to expect that he would, for once, put his best foot forward. Instead, he plumbed new depths with a speech that was for the most part fake news.

I got an enquiry from a foreign journalist following up on the President’s claim that the public wage bill is eating up 50 per cent of government revenue. I promptly sent him a link to the Budget Policy Statement 2017 on the National Treasury’s website with a reference to the table with the relevant data, to which he responded by asking whether I was aware “that the number for wages doesn’t represent 50 per cent of total revenues.” What was I to say?

WAGE BILL

The national government wage bill for this financial year published by the National Treasury is Sh307 billion, against a total revenue of Sh1.519 trillion, a ratio of 24 per cent, down from 28 per cent four years ago. The Budget paper projects it as declining further to 21 per cent by the 2019-2020 financial year. Adding the counties pushes the ratio up to 33 per cent. Even the entire consolidated public sector wage bill, including commercial parastatals that do not depend on tax revenue, as misleading as it is, would only push the ratio up to 40 per cent. Fifty per cent is an alternative fact.

In his 2016 State of the Nation address, the President said: “In the last three years, my administration has tarmacked approximately 3,000km – or an average rate of 1,000km per year”.

In his address this year, he said: “In 2013, we promised to undertake the most aggressive road construction programme ever seen in Kenya. With 1,950km of new roads completed and another 7,000km under different phases of construction, we have kept the promise”.

Jameni! Somebody has literally eaten 1,000km of tarmac.

The 508-km Isiolo-Moyale road, one of the recent landmark projects, has taken eight years to build. It was started in 2008 and completed last year. Eight years!

TOTAL LENGTH

Figures published in the Economic Survey 2016, the primary source of official statistics, show that the total length of trunk and major roads (class A, B and C) as at end of 2015 stood at 8,200km, up from 7,900km in 2013. That is an increase of 300km, and that is unlikely to include any roads that the Jubilee administration started. The same report lists all the major roads completed and under construction last financial year FY15/16. There are 46 of them, ranging in length from the Changamwe-Industrial Area (1.8km) to Eldoret-Ziwa-Kachibora-Moi’s Bridge (74.5km), a grand total of 1,096.2km.

Fact: the Jubilee administration has not completed 1,950km of road, and we do not have 7,000km of road under construction.

The President also said: “Our joint effort with the County Government of Turkana has led to the successful implementation of a government-driven livestock insurance and compensation programme, a first in Kenyan and African history”.

This came a week after he lambasted Turkana Governor Josphat Nanok as having nothing to show for the county’s Sh50 billion (correction: Sh33 billion) revenue share over the last four years.

Transport and Infrastructure Cabinet Secretary James Macharia (centre) and other leaders during the inspection of a road in Igembe South in Meru on March 24, 2017. PHOTO | PHOEBE OKALL | NATION MEDIA GROUP

President Kenyatta does not give a damn whether what he says is true or not. Whether we prove that he is lying or not is of no consequence. Mtado?

Granted, spin and sexing up data is de rigueur in politics but to lie nonchalantly in a State of the Nation address is contempt for the nation.

Blatant lying and mindless aggression are not what would be reasonably expected of a president who is seeking re-election. What are we dealing with here? I see four things.

The first is stress. The President has suffered a string of embarrassing, even humiliating setbacks that he has suffered lately. For whatever reason, the administration seems to have been very heavily invested in Amina Mohammed’s candidacy for the African Union chairperson’s post. Coming after the double-cross on the oil-pipeline deal, the hint of backstabbing by East African Community partners seems to have gone down particularly badly. The debacle was, without a doubt, the epitaph on the “coalition of the willing”. Since then, the anti-ICC coalition that they had put together has crumbled.

The Jubilee Party merger is turning out to be a monumental debacle. The more fundamental setback however was the deal with Kanu, and how it was consummated; sabre-rattling by Gideon Moi, Mama Ngina’s visits to retired President Moi, Uhuru following suit, deal, then silence. The President will no doubt know that these images will reinforce the suspicion that his political umbilical cord is still firmly in place.

BACKFIRED BADLY

The project-commissioning campaign has backfired badly. With the #UhuruChallenge, Kenyans mocked the President by commissioning everything from bathroom slippers to ugali cooking projects. The hashtag trended on twitter for days, to the extent of attracting coverage by the mainstream international media. The “dab dance” also went viral for all the wrong reasons.

These would be serious setbacks for any politician a few months to election, let alone one who has seldom encountered adversities that his surname or family fortune could not fix.

The second, which partly follows from the first, is rebranding for the forthcoming election. For the last election, the President ran on brand “cool”. Brand cool was targeted at the digital generation. As digital utopia morphed into tenderpreneur dystopia, brand cool has lost its appeal. The brand’s signature national colour armbands have disappeared.

All this is not lost to his admen. The man must be rebranded, but to what? The greatest political upset of this since Adolf Hitler has been delivered by the bellicose lying Donald Trump. Who brand Trump is meant to appeal to is hard to figure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

POLITICAL BAGGAGE

The third factor is the President’s political baggage. His tirades in the counties are not random. There is method.

The flare-ups began in Mombasa during the issuance of title deeds to the Waitiki farm squatters when he was challenged on why the Government was asking the squatters to pay for title deeds. This has since escalated into a full-blown political war with Mombasa Governor Ali Hassan Joho. Then came Narok at William ole Ntimama’s funeral, provoked by Raila Odinga raising the non-implementation of the Truth Justice Reconciliation (TJRC) Report, and a cleric who opined that the Maasai ought to prioritise unity over development. The Turkana invective was provoked by the county governor’s beef with a disagreeable oil revenue sharing law.

Sio mimi hupitisha sheria, ni bunge. Mimi ni kuweka naweka kidole, halafu mjinga hapa anakuja kusema hapa ati mimi nafanya mambo ya… heh! (I am not the one who enacts laws, it is Parliament. I only sign, and then an idiot here says I did… )

Fact: late last year, both Houses passed a Bill that would have entitled communities and county governments to 10 and 20 per cent of oil revenue respectively. The President sent it back with a memorandum that chopped the community share by half and proposed for the county share ambiguous criteria that amount to national government discretion.

DIRECT CHALLENGES

The President is quite evidently unable to deal with direct challenges on issues of historical injustices rationally. His adversaries have figured this out. After his most recent altercation in Mombasa, Governor Joho took his campaign to Taita Taveta, a county where it is said that the Tsavo National Park and a handful of squires including the Kenyatta family are said to occupy over 70 per cent of the land – stick knife and turn. Many years ago, I was facilitating a conversation with the President and his political think tank. After talking about many things, I said that there was an elephant in the room we needed to talk about. Which one? Land, I said. The body language said everything I needed to know.

The Turkana incident brings to the fore a dimension about which much the country is in denial: character. Having vetoed the law, the President should have had the moral courage to defend his decision. This was, after all, a policy position on which one would expect the President took expert advice. He could have made reference to this. The tactful thing to do, seeing as he was out on a vote hustle, would have been to acknowledge the differences and promise to sit down and resolve them.

Instead, he said: “You think the world will stop (if you do not vote for me)”.

We are also dealing with a deeply flawed character.

A Mswahili friend shared with me a little gem of wisdom that the mouth betrays the heart.

In a live interview the other day, the President said: “I wish we had the old Constitution.”

Why is he seeking re-election?