Missed opportunity as Uhuru disappoints with timid speech

President Uhuru Kenyatta addresses residents at Masii grounds in Machakos on April 2, 2019 during the launch of the National Integrated Identity Management System registration exercise. Public confidence in his leadership may keep dwindling by the day. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • In such uncertain and precarious times, political correctness and middle ground politics cannot suffice in place of decisive and unequivocal action.
  • There were many ways in which President Kenyatta would have avoided sacking his ministers and still delivered a notable speech.

Few speeches have been much anticipated than President Uhuru Kenyatta’s State of the Nation address, delivered to Parliament on Thursday.

Other than the expectation that this routine constitutionally stipulated annual status report ordinarily gives a sense of where things stand and what to expect going forward, the Kenyan public was curious to confirm the veracity of sustained speculation preceding the speech about an impending purge of Cabinet secretaries suspected to have been implicated in corruption scandals.

Of particular interest was a cluster of ministers recently questioned by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations over the suspected siphoning of billions of shillings off the Arror and Kimwarer dam construction projects, considered one of the most blatant grand heists within government.

Through a mixture of negligence — since the former Attorney-General’s counsel against the contracting of a dubious Italian firm was reportedly unheeded — and the practice of shameless impunity, billions of shillings were diverted from the projects into private pockets.

ACCOUNTABILITY

It was therefore not too much for Kenyans to ask of the Head of State to comment on the matter as regards the highest responsibility holders within his government, and what price they would pay individually and collectively as a result.

The buck certainly stops with the President, and therefore if he wasn’t implicated, then what action was he taking on those under his watch who had either absconded their responsibilities or actively partaken in corruption?

Midway through his speech, the President cracked an uncharacteristic joke about how he had been weighed down by pressure to announce who he had sacked among his ministers, going ahead to offer relief to his Cabinet by declaring that no one was losing their jobs just yet.

And that joke right there formed part of the speech’s anticlimax.

HOPE

In his effort not to succumb to demands which flooded radio, TV, newspapers and social media platforms for him to spill blood within his Cabinet, the President regurgitated the usual socio-economic and security sector-related talking points, not giving the country something solid to hold onto especially through these difficult times of economic hardship and political apathy.

The speech lacked a philosophical backbone. Aside from a clear sense of direction out of the prevailing plunder, the country yearned for reassurance that there are people within government, including the President, who are seriously thinking about not only the present challenges but also future possibilities.

This sort of big mindset centred around the common man’s concerns can only be grounded in a refined belief system and ethos, around which the Head of State can then rally the nation.

It is not in doubt that President Kenyatta can deliver speeches powerfully, but delivery alone, if one is off message, can only go so far.

JADED

In such situations, the President ends up sounding hollow and uninspiring, as if simply rehashing whatever has been handed over to him without engaging with its letter and spirit, further creating the impression that he doesn’t have his finger on the country’s pulse.

In such uncertain and precarious times, political correctness and middle ground politics cannot suffice in place of decisive and unequivocal action.

There were many ways in which President Kenyatta would have avoided sacking his ministers and still delivered a notable speech.

But as they say, action speaks louder than words. Therefore, the Head of State needed to deliver actionable words to give the nation something to hold onto and keep revisiting before the subsequent State of the Nation address in 2020, an interim mini-manifesto of sorts.

It is getting tiring for Kenyans to keep looking back with nostalgia to President Kenyatta’s 2015 State of the Nation address, which remains his best to date even if elements of it remain unimplemented.

VISION

Away from asking a bunch of ministers suspected of corruption to step aside, the President seemed to be sharing with the country a gospel of renewal and a hitherto non-existent sense of political and administrative decisiveness, thereby inspiring hope.

It was therefore a reasonable expectation that President Kenyatta would surpass his 2015 speech not by merely repeating what he has been saying about governance and corruption, but by breaking away from the norm and giving the country more in terms of vision and practicalities of steering Kenya forward and away from the current muck and mire.

By sidestepping this challenge and playing the business as usual card — a costly mistake which may come back to haunt the President — public confidence in government as a whole and in his leadership in particular may keep dwindling by the day, as the corrupt roam freely.

With his words seeming evidently insufficient, the President now needs to speak through his actions.