Uhuru Don’t Include Thieves In Your Cabinet.

About 11 years ago, I was having a drink with the head of a parastatal in the Kibaki administration. He is a brilliant chap, well respected. We were discussing corruption. He told me about an innovative plan to inject money into our economy daily — a plan he had shared with the Cabinet.
The plan was to introduce a light train connecting Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters on Langata Road. Kenya is a big transit point, according to the latest number JKIA handles over seven million passengers yearly. Most of them are transit passengers.
Passengers on transit with long layover can deposit their passports and board a light train to KWS headquarters. At the headquarters they can visit Nairobi National Park, the animal orphanage or Bomas of Kenya, which is a few minutes away and get a chance to buy Kenyan artifacts.
This great plan never took off. You know why? The insiders in government couldn’t agree on who was going to get the tender. So an idea that would have benefited the entire country was killed before inception because a few, selfish individuals couldn’t agree on whose turn it was to eat.
Which brings me the interesting lists of proposed Cabinet Secretaries currently circulating on social media. The key qualification of the people named appears to be sycophancy — people who were loyal to Uhuru during his re-election campaign. Some of them don’t even deserve to chair a wedding committee.
I asked a friend of mine if he wanted to be a Cabinet Secretary and he said, “Hell, NO!” Cabinet Secretaries are supposed to serve the people, but politicians see them as their cash cow; a source of quick cash through granting of tenders. The last time my friend worked for government, he found himself dealing with tender matters. He was harassed by politicians to give them tenders to print T-shirts and so on. My friend went on to explain that even if he is not corrupt, there is a powerful character who collects money from every Cabinet Secretary on a weekly basis. My friend isn’t ready to play those games.
When Kenya Airports Authority appointed Jonny Andersen as the managing director, the Norwegian national thought he was coming to manage an airport, but soon found he was mostly dealing with tender and employment issues. He would arrive at work to find politicians, who had bullied their way through security and his secretary, at the reception
demanding tenders and work opportunities for their constituents.
Cabinet Secretaries control big budgets and a lot of money is stolen right beneath their noses either by commission or omission. A CS earning Sh1 million will buy a house worth 300 million shillings. A close associate will get a tender worth Sh1.4 billion, supply nothing, pay zero taxes and escape being charged because those meant to investigate them have been bribed. Stories about Cabinet Secretaries stealing are published in the dailies and the culprits are scandalized for a brief period only to join politics using the same ill-gotten loot to bribe voters. That explains why some of the richest people in this country once occupied a public office where they looted mercilessly.
So, whereas the countries we admire will go for merit, in Kenya, even thieves, idiots and jokers get rewarded with Cabinet posts based on tribe and whatever numbers they helped bring to the election winner. Kenyans, in short, have been reduced to mere “numbers” whose duty is facilitate theft of their own taxes.
That brings me to an evening conversation I had with a Singaporean minister at a conference in Switzerland, who told me that he convened town hall meetings every month where he would present his ministry’s plans to the public and listen to them question his strategy. If the strategy was faulty, he would use the public’s feedback to improve it.
Men and women with the education, skill, integrity and passion with which this Singaporean minister approaches his duties are not lacking within our borders and the President would do Kenyans a favour if he ignored sycophants and hired real and incorruptible talent.
Having been elected to office, and this being his last term, he has absolutely no reason to kowtow to thieving riffraff and punctured politicians whose only qualification is that they desperately need a job.