How Kiraitu is writing Meru’s success story

Meru Governor Kiraitu Murungi is deeply proud of his cultural heritage in a way most of his peers aren’t. And it is not just that the Harvard-educated lawyer, former Imenti South Member of Parliament and Cabinet minister speaks the Queen’s language with the distinctly heavy accent of a Meru Njuri Ncheke elder.

In his poetry book aptly titled The Song of My Beloved, a collection of poems published in 2006, Mr Murungi romanticises his village roots at the foot of Mount Kenya while laying into the local elite for flaunting their acquired Western cultures and lifestyles.

Skip your Mercedes Sports

I have no place to go.

Skip your Woollen suits, It is too hot

Skip your Queen's English

Those vocabularies

Mean nothing to me

I speak only Kimeru. Just give me

A maize cob, And a place, To plant the seeds.

The book was clearly inspired by a particularly dark chapter of Mr Murungi’s public service career, the highlight of which were corruption allegations that temporarily forced him out of the Mwai Kibaki Cabinet.

Protestations of his own innocence often fell on deaf ears in a public square that had increasingly become hostile to the so-called 6Ms, a clique of powerful men that was widely reported in the media to be in the Kibaki kitchen cabinet.

The tumult of media negativity targeting him, Mr Murungi suggests in one of the poems, made him choose to retreat to the calm, peace and love of Meru, “where there is no KTN, Standard or Nation.”

600 RECRUITS

If that famous return to Meru by one of its illustrious sons smacks more of banishment than retreat, the second coming is certainly a much happier one.

As the current governor of Meru, Mr Murungi is emerging as one of the few good leadership apples in a basket full of rotten ones.

One of the first things he did on the job was order an audit of the county’s pending bills.

The audit unearthed an intricate fraud racket involving rogue contractors and procurement officials that robbed the county’s coffers of hundreds of millions of shillings.

On Friday, 600 recruits under his pet Meru Youth Service programme reported to Meru National Polytechnic to pursue qualifications in various technical and business courses.

MORAL AUTHORITY

The news website countyreview.co.ke reported that another group of 400 was attending a two-week training camp to prepare them for roles on community health campaigns such as immunisation and county government-supported mass NHIF registration.

If Mr Murungi can guard his youth service modelled on the NYS against Kabura-Ngirita-type dealings, it should help tackle unemployment and shortage of skilled labour in Meru significantly.

And it should give him the moral authority to ask other governors to go read another poem from his book as well:

Honourable Members; Ladies and gentlemen

Fellow pretenders

Is politics, Nothing but your clan wars?

Is Kenya nothing but you, Your stomach, And your village?

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