President Kenyatta chose ostentatious way to announce his weaknesses to the world

Even before Jubilee took power in 2013, it had identified Kenyan civil society as its enemy, with Denis Itumbi coming up with the nickname “evil society” in reference to “civil society”, which has stuck since.

Once Jubilee took power, Itumbi went on to head the new government’s social media function, a position from which he has continued to do more of what he did before. Jubilee, thereafter, reinforced its media capabilities, with the President setting up the Presidential Strategic Communication Unit, an outfit that has also been responsible for deriding anybody regarded as an opponent of the Jubilee administration.

In addition to the efforts made by those that he has hired to work for him, President Uhuru Kenyatta has personally also gone on attack.

On several occasions, his official speeches have contained strong language against civil society, accusing them of promoting foreign interests and of being out to ruin the national interest.

The President’s close advisers have also ridiculed individual members of civil society and have sought to justify the crackdown that Jubilee has carried out against them.

While the hostile political rhetoric continued when Jubilee took power, the new government started employing its regulatory power to harass Kenya’s civil society sector.

REDUCE SPACE

As part of this, there have been repeated attempts to enact legislation to reduce the operating space for the sector. Further, the civil society regulators have, in turn, also used the same political rhetoric to justify a repressive approach to their regulatory duties, accusing organisations of engaging in terrorism and money laundering.

Under these circumstances, it came as a surprise that the President should take offence that John Githongo and David Ndii, two leading lights in the Kenyan civil society sector, and who were invited to last week’s State House anti-corruption summit, chose to skip the event.

The simple truth is that after four years of being attacked, it is surprising for members of Kenyan civil society to then be expected to maintain good-faith engagements in these spaces. At the moment, it is not just the government that is suspicious of civil society; civil society is now also deeply suspicious of the government and views every opportunity to engage with the government as a trap.

The President would need to recognise that a conversation around the dysfunctional relationship between his government and the Kenyan civil society would be a condition-precedent to establishing a normal working relationship between the two.

Turning to the summit itself, this was meant to be a showcase of Jubilee’s commitment to the fight against corruption, bringing together all departments of the government that must collaborate if the fight is to succeed.

INTO ROOM

In particular, the President managed to get the judiciary into the room, a feat since the judiciary usually refuses to engage in such forums because of arguments about the separation of powers. The accompanying media publicity was meant to signal the wider public about the intentions driving the summit.

However, the summit did not quite live up to this billing.

To begin with, the format was poor. The selection of Jeff Koinange as moderator backfired, partly because he was unable to transcend his television brand, but also because this led to the use of his usual television format for this forum, leaving the discussions rather flighty and lacking in policy substance.

Secondly, the lack of preparation on the part of all involved became rather obvious. The worst of them all was the President who, having not processed what he was going to say, decided to do a waffle. His remarks failed to put across his views in policy terms, and he ended up mocking his audience rather than talking to them.

In particular, his remarks towards the Auditor-General were calculated to discourage his investigation of the Eurobond scandal. The President communicated an understanding of his own role in the fight against corruption which, according to him, only constituted in ensuring that anti-corruption agencies were well funded. As long as there was funding for the agencies, his work was done and the rest was up to those agencies.

DIFFERENT REPORTS

A sign of the multiple meanings in the President’s remarks was reflected in the fact that the different media that covered the summit had rather different reports on what they understood the President to have said.

In the end, the summit was no more than a high-end junket. It provided no extra clarity on what might be done to address corruption. On the contrary, it provided evidence of an additional layer of difficulties that the fight against corruption has to address, consisting in official hostility towards the office of the Auditor-General.

Also, it provided plenty of opportunities for the agencies present to pass the buck and to show that the problems lay elsewhere.

All the agencies blamed the law and the President, in particular, blamed the Constitution, which he views as standing in the way of his fight against corruption. The best summary of the event was the characterisation, by the President, of the fight against corruption as a political circus. In his understanding, the problem was not the presence of corruption but the politicisation of the fight against corruption.

The presidency is the one office under whose leadership all the disparate public efforts are unified into coherent programmes.

From the performance last week, the President has no big-picture view of how the various efforts that go into an anti-corruption programme ought to work and, therefore, also no capacity to conduct a diagnosis of the prevailing weaknesses.

In the State House summit, the President chose an ostentatious way to announce his weaknesses to the world.

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