To reboot Kenya, Uhuru should seek to win hearts and minds

President Uhuru Kenyatta leads Kenyans in celebrating Jamhuri Day at Nyayo National Stadium on December 12, 2018. He is campaigning against corruption.

What you need to know:

  • Uhuru must nurture trust between his government and citizens, which may include making hard choices, like implementing the truth and reconciliation report.

Kenya turned 55 during Wednesday’s Jamhuri Day. In his speech, President Uhuru Kenyatta spent time updating the country on his Big Four legacy projects — enhancing manufacturing, food security and nutrition, universal health coverage, and affordable housing.

But before dwelling on these, the Head of State used quite some strong words, reminding the country that "freedom was not given on a silver platter but fought for", urging the younger generation to "keep the flame of our freedom fighters alive", reiterating that "our nation has new enemies", — in reference to terrorism.

The President then retreated to his new pet subject — corruption. He fired warning shots at corrupt state officials, urging Kenyans, media and civil society to rally behind his anti-corruption campaign.

The President’s speech is always important because it reveals the state of the nation in the eyes and mind of the Head of State and his government, but in the end, a lot of speeches end up sounding monotonously similar.

This is an inherent setback for leaders across the world, which makes them either reinvent the art of speech making, or compels them to set speeches aside and resort to other mechanisms for winning hearts and minds — by going beyond words. This is President Kenyatta’s current challenge.

LEGACY

For some reason, 55 sounds like a magical number, laden with meaning, evoking a sense of maturity and stability.

Were Kenya not a state but an individual, turning 55 comes with expectations, if not responsibilities. Responsibilities both to self and to others, expectations from oneself and from others.

For President Kenyatta — beyond worrying about his legacy — the big question should be what is expected of a 55-year-old republic.

At independence, the expectation Kenya set for itself as famously articulated by the country’s founding President, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, was that it sought to alleviate poverty, disease and ignorance, implying that wealth creation, healthcare and education were the lead priorities.

Fifty five years later, under Uhuru Kenyatta — the founding president’s son — Kenya is still grappling with these challenges, albeit not at the 1963 scale.

It goes without saying that sometimes countries have unrealistic expectations of themselves, by either being over confident or by punching below their weight, begging the question as to whether Kenya was ambitious enough at independence, and whether the country had its priorities right from the beginning.

ROADMAP

Tellingly, and as if to borrow wholesale from his father’s independence blueprint, on assuming his second term of office, President Kenyatta consolidated his legacy projects into the Big Four.

For any keen observer, these sound like a rebooting of the independence roadmap — seeing that wealth creation (manufacturing and housing) and healthcare still linger — as if to say the independence experiment didn’t fully succeed.

The adoption of the independence dream at this time therefore means that Kenya has not succeeded in creatively reinventing itself for the past five decades, a state of affairs common in majority of post-colonial African states.

In Kenya’s case, the 2010 Constitution marked the arrival of a new state architecture, but then renewal demands more than just hardware, since for the most part, the post-independence failures are mainly attributed to self-sabotage by those entrusted with state power.

This may sound like an oxymoron — because why would anyone sabotage themselves immediately after long drawn bloody liberation struggles.

ETHOS

The answer is that these deficiencies of character were due to a lack of a national software to carry people forward, an ethos of Ubuntu or Ujamaa, to make compatriots value the whole above the self.

It is in answering this question, of why the independence project did not soar as originally purposed, that we may find answers on why we continue struggling in realising the most basic of our aspirations to date.

As for the fight against corruption, the actions of the state seem to match the words of the President, but as much as slaying corruption is important in taking Kenya forward, many other areas of governance and society demand attention.

In pursuing the independence dream — and in dreaming new ones — the President must embark on developing a new national software, which like the war on corruption, will make the country rally behind him since his actions will match his words.

STEADFAST

As a starting point, the President must nurture trust between his government and citizens, which may include making hard choices, like implementing the truth and reconciliation report.

It is such tough, grand gestures that demand huge personal and collective sacrifices, that will properly reboot Kenya. Unless this happens, Kenya will keep on ageing, and its age won’t carry any significance.