It's Uhuru's own fault he lost anti-corruption credentials

President Uhuru Kenyatta at the State House Summit on Governance, Anti-Corruption and Accountability at State House in Nairobi on October 18, 2016. PHOTO | SAMUEL MIRING'U | PSCU

What you need to know:

  • Uhuru Kenyatta has failed because he thinks tactics that were effective for winning him presidency would also be effective in managing Kenya.
  • Having chosen wrong tactics, he now condemns everyone but his office and its weak leadership.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has lost the anti-corruption credentials he had at the beginning of his term.

It is his own fault. So when he fulminated against corruption and his helplessness at fighting it at the just-concluded State House Governance and Accountability Summit, few who have watched his spin-driven, spotlight-obsessed campaigns on corruption sympathised.

He has failed because he thinks that tactics that were effective for winning him the Presidency — reckless promises that he never meant to keep, whistle-stop helicopter tours to dazzle rag-clad villagers and beautiful words mellifluously delivered — would also be effective in managing Kenya.

Having chosen the wrong tactics, he now condemns everyone but his office and its weak leadership: I don’t have enough powers; all departments are corrupt; the Judiciary is abetting corruption and independent institutions are perhaps too independent for efficient government.

This sort of thing is called flailing. It has four sources: the President’s ethical indecision when confronted with hard choices; his tendency to rely on his friends for advice even when they are incompetent and mistaken; his mistaken fear that fighting corruption will imperil his second-term ambitions by undercutting his political support and, finally, his instinct to blame everyone but himself and his office for his failed leadership on corruption.

HIS INDECISION

Let us start with his indecision. The core problem is ethical. President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto rode to office on the back of a moral conundrum. They had been indicted at The Hague for the worst crimes known to law and yet, through clever spin and by cynically mobilising nationalism — not unlike Donald Trump mobilising the worst sentiments of an ill-informed segment of American opinion — succeeded in presenting what were criminal indictments against them as a form of new-age imperialism targeting Kenya.

He and his deputy thus got to office without the moral authority that most newly-elected leaders often need to fight legacies of impunity such as those that Kenya had carried over from past administrations.

That initial problem was then made worse by the inordinate time the two then spent trying to convince the African Union, AU, to ditch the International Criminal Court ( ICC). Lacking moral authority to start with and then distracted by sideshows to win support from his peers on the continent, the President’s effort against corruption was left without a leader. By the time he wizened up to the perils of that neglect, most of his allies had their noses so deep in the gravy they needed to wear snorkels to breath. Thus began a long period of big presidential words and small bureaucratic actions. This, in turn, signalled to the corrupt that the flurry of activities that followed each of the President’s tough speeches was survivable: hunker down, warn lowly staff in your department to stay out of harm’s way and let the storm of media-driven threats blow over.

POOR EXECUTION

Poor strategy has then been weakened by poor execution. When the President takes action it is usually inept. Look at the prosecution of hopeless cases, like that of Thuita Mwangi and Allan Mburu for the Tokyo Scandal or the dramatic suspension of 175 senior civil servants on evidence so flimsy that it cannot support a charge, let alone a conviction. Tough talk is usually anchored on weasel actions: workshops, summits – like this last one – and study tours, including a mad-hatter trip by the attorney-general to learn from China how to fight corruption. The very China at the heart of oil and mineral corruption in places like Angola and South Sudan.

There is a second problem: The President’s personality is such that he craves popularity and wants to be loyal to his friends, often to a fault. He could learn a thing or two from President Kibaki who never had a friend he could not sell down the river if need be. Just ask David Mwiraria and Dr Chris Murungaru. President Uhuru has two problems. First, his friends also happen to be his trusted advisers. Secondly, arising from that first fact, when they give him the wrong advice he gets gored on a dilemma of his own making: if he hires other advisers he loses his friends, which he finds painful. Confronted by this choice, his instinct is to keep his friends and continue making bad decisions. This may explain his obvious anger and frustration whenever something goes wrong. It also accounts for the frequent contradictions in policy-making by his administration. Uhuru’s path out of this mess is easy. None of Kenya’s past presidents used his friends as key advisers on policy matters. Mbiyu Koinange and James Gichuru may have been Jomo Kenyatta’s closest friends but they were not his closest advisers. Mulu Mutisya, Kariuki Chotara and Henry Cheboiwo were President Moi’s close friends but hardly critical advisers on anything other than village gossip and local politics.

POLITICAL OPPONENTS

President Kibaki was the most catholic in his choice of advisers, even reaching out to those who had been his political opponents – like John Njoroge Michuki. President Uhuru Kenyatta, by contrast, mixes up what he feels comfortable about – hanging out with friends – with what is good for him and the country – getting sound advice.

And then there is the fact, increasingly obvious as the election looms closer: President Kenyatta’s hesitance to fight corruption for fear of losing the allies he thinks he needs to win a second term. His increasingly complicated alliance with Mr Ruto is the best example of this conflict between his wants and his needs. There is no doubt that though he wants Ruto for the Rift Valley vote, he does not need him if he is to secure a legacy of running an honest government.

The Deputy President has his finger-prints in so many unsavoury places, it leaves the President looking complicit in sleaze. The list of dodgy dealings that the deputy is mentioned in grows longer by the day. In 2013, in the case of Adrian Gilbert Muteshi vs William Samoei Ruto & 4 Others, Lady Justice Rose Ougo in effect ruled that Ruto had taken Mr Muteshi’s 100-acre farm in the 2008 post-election violence. Perhaps more worrying is the Weston Hotel, which the Deputy President has admitted he owns. According to a flurry of letters exchanged by various permanent secretaries in 2001 and 2002, the land on which the Weston Hotel now sits was set aside to hold “sensitive air navigation equipment,” as Ambassador Muthaura, then head of the civil service, put it. By February 2003 though, a portion of that land, in total about 0.7733 hectares, had been hived off to an unnamed private developer. That mysterious developer was revealed to be Weston Hotel by the Auditor-General in his 2012 report. There are other instances, including a case involving the sale of Ngong Forest land to Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC). Though the Deputy President had been acquitted of that charge, there were allegations of witness tampering. Last year, the late Jacob Juma revived the issue and wrote to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, arguing that the case was live because the KPC had lost both the land – since it is a gazetted forest – and its money, since William Ruto and Joshua Kulei had not refunded the money the corporation had paid out. Now that the Deputy President has sued activist Boniface Mwangi for defamation, these details and others no less sleazy are likely to re-surface, much to the chagrin of President Kenyatta.

BLAME OTHERS

Finally, there is the government’s tendency to blame others and offer lame excuses: the attorney-general, reflecting official thinking, says that independent agencies have created inefficiencies. It is the Judiciary he had in mind. He lamented the judges’ tendency to stall corruption cases by dubious injunctions. Implicit in this illiterate diagnosis is, as one senior counsel points out, the daft assumption that if the Judiciary were stripped of independence, it would fight corruption better. This misses a crucial point: The Judiciary is a passive agency, it works with what it receives from the EACC and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), both of which have been rather lethargic about fighting confirmed cases of corruption and rather active in prosecuting hopeless ones.

Why has so little been done to prosecute even clear cases? How about the electoral procurement fraud in the Chicken-gate scam in which officials of the IEBC were found to have bribed directors of Smith and Ouzman, a security printer in the UK? Or the prosecution – and requested extradition – of Samuel Gichuru – former Managing Director of Kenya Power and Lighting Company – and Chris Okemo, former minister for Finance – whose property is already forfeit to the state in Britain for money-laundering? Who is putting obstacles in the Auditor-General’s efforts to get to the bottom of the Eurobond scandal? These are the real questions. President Kenyatta cannot duck them by saying he is helpless. His actions, and those of his government, suggest unwillingness not inability.

 

Wachira Maina is a constitutional lawyer.