President Uhuru Kenyatta entered office the wealthiest individual and with much less baggage than all his predecessors in terms of owing political debts. The one political debt he does owe, to Deputy President William Ruto, is non-financial, and with the rolling out of the Cabinet nominees, he seems to have repaid it handsomely, making his deputy one of the most ferocious of power-sharing negotiators. The proposed Cabinet of four politicos and 16 technocrats looks all set to turn a new page in Kenyan history…
Like everything else about the UhuRuto advent, from the vote count to the court challenge, even the much-delayed nomination of their Cabinet was an excruciatingly slow, nail-biting and deliberative process, circumscribed on all sides by the systems and procedures of the new constitution.
They may be the youngest pair to enter the Kenyan presidency but they are certainly not young men in a hurry. However, the digital duo need to lose their 'analogue era' attitude towards timelines and deadlines and to do so extra fast if they are not to squander considerable goodwill from the multimedia newsrooms and audiences that number in the millions.
President Uhuru Kenyatta’s piecemeal announcements this week of 16 nominees to his much-awaited 18-member Cabinet started on Tuesday with just four names.
But it immediately grabbed and retained, indeed transfixed, the nation’s – and its far-flung Diaspora’s – attention in a way no other unveiling of a Cabinet has done since the very first one back in May 1963.
ONLY THREE MT KENYA NOMINEES
By the time he released the names of a dozen other nominees on Thursday morning, it was abundantly clear that here was a Cabinet line-up like none other in Kenyan history. It had only three Central Kenya (Kikuyu) nominees, five from Rift Valley, one from Luo Nyanza, one from Luhyaland, five women and four men and women with an Islamic heritage.
In both style and substance, this was a whole new ball game. In shirt sleeves and matching red ties, President Uhuru and Deputy President William Ruto put on a distinctly informal tag team show of announcing the first four nominees and then fielding reporters’ questions like none other ever seen at State House, Nairobi.
When they turned up in suits and under flood lights on Wednesday, it was to announce that they were not yet ready to release the second batch of names, apologize profusely and make two promises which they did not keep.
One, to announce the full list no later than 9am Thursday. Two, that the only politicos in the new-style Cabinet would be themselves, the other 16 being apolitical technocrats. On Thursday morning, running three hours late but again in shirtsleeves, the duo completed the Cabinet nominations.
On both occasions the announcements of the nominees came complete with sound-bite bio data, stating their academic qualifications and professional and career paths, marital status, number and, at least once, names of children, and then inviting the prospective to the battery of microphones to say something to the assembled press corps.
GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
What’s more, against all expectations, Uhuru went contrary to Central Kenya tradition and nominated a non-Kikuyu to be head of the Treasury – neither his Dad, the late Jomo (in office for 15 years) nor his baptismal godfather, the now retired Kibaki (10 years), across a total of 25 years, appointed a non-Kikuyu to lead the Exchequer.
The Energy & Petroleum docket, another high-profile, high-impact ministry, also went to a non-Kikuyu, Davis Chirchir, another Ruto nominee. Agriculture, Livestock & Fisheries also went to the URP side of the Jubilee Coalition.
As for career banker Macharia, until the nomination the Group CEO of the NIC Bank, those who would have preferred a health professional to be in charge of national healthcare policy (for instance the Kenya Medical Association) are being answered by another key consideration – health services are now a constitutional right for all Kenyans, in other words to be paid for by taxpayers’ shillings.
A money man of Macharia’s credentials and track record (NIC grew five-fold in recent years under his stewardship) is very likely what the healthcare sector, which has been plagued by a succession of corrupt political appointees bereft of any conceivable relevant competence or value addition for decades, needs just now.
President Uhuru’s nomination of Dr Matiang’i as Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and ICTs also instantly registered as beyond reproach across the political aisle and in the relevant sectors.
The first batch of nominees, Fred Matiang'i (Information, Communications and Technology), Henry K. Rotich (the National Treasury), James Wainaina Macharia (Health) and Ambassador Amina Mohamed (Foreign Affairs), possess glittering credentials and have had sterling high-achiever careers.
The second batch featured another first-class banker – Adan Abdalla Mohamed, CEO of Barclays Kenya and an MBA graduate of the world-class Harvard Business School as the nominee for Secretary of Industrialisation.
NOMINEES OF THE FIRST WATER
It was immediately clear that a Cabinet of professionals and technocrats of the first water was being rolled out here, for the first time in Kenyan history.
There have been previous presidential attempts to install technocratic appointees at the top in the bureaucracy in Kenya but never as a full-fledged Cabinet.
First, there was President Daniel arap Moi’s deployment of Dr Richard Leakey’s Dream Team of 1998, with the world-famous palaeontologist as Head of the Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet and a number of his own handpicked teammates drawn from global organisations.
Secondly, there was President Mwai Kibaki’s 2003 appointment of anti-graft crusader John Githongo, again an appointee with a global reputation, as the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President in charge of Ethics and Governance. Githongo came complete with a State House-based office at a time when the then incoming President was still recovering from injuries sustained in a road high-speed road smash on the 2002 campaign trail.
But here was President Uhuru rolling out 18 Cabinet secretaries, six of whom are women, having promised a team of non-politicos in the cockpit of government itself and giving every indication with the first four, who are clearly among the best and the brightest in this country in their chosen fields, that the complete list would follow suit.
On Wednesday evening, Deputy President Ruto even went out of his way to categorically state before the cameras and the microphones on live TV and radio that the only politicos in the complete final line-up would be the President and himself.
Uhuru’s accommodation of Balala and Ngilu was clearly an extremely last-minute decision and the clearest indication yet of the ferocity of the behind-the-scenes negotiations. These two nominees have much to prove and could ultimately turn out to be the weakest links of an otherwise strong Cabinet.
The second Kenyatta Cabinet will inevitably be compared to the first Kenyatta Cabinet of 50 years ago. The first Cabinet, under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, was a glittering team that is still spoken of in awed tones half-a-century after it took up office.
It had 15 members but still packed a tremendous face of Kenya punch – Five Kikuyus; four Luos, and one each of Maragoli, Kamba, Maasai, Kisii, Meru and Taita.
A big part of the reason for the first Kenyatta Cabinet being so remarkable was because it was the first overwhelmingly Kenyan African council of ministers, featuring only one European member, Agriculture Minister Bruce McKenzie, and the biracial Joseph Murumbi, Minister for Foreign Affairs, of Maa and Goan parentage.
Kenya was transitioning from an overtly racist colonial dispensation in which the Cabinet had been all-white for more than a half-a-century, with African ministers being installed only since 1960.
With benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the first Kenyatta Cabinet was woefully lacking in terms of accumulated government/Cabinet experience or commensurate expertise at the boardroom level.
The most consistently employed, experienced, urbane and cosmopolitan of the African members of the first Cabinet was Murumbi, designated Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office and given the Foreign Affairs docket.
Murumbi, born 1911, had all his higher education in India, returning to Kenya in 1941, and working for the next 10 years for an entity called the Administration of Somalia.
From 1951 to 1957, Murumbi was the Assistant Secretary of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, an intercontinental body. Between 1957 and 1961, he was the Press and Tourism attaché in the Moroccan Embassy in London. He joined Kanu in the year before Independence as treasurer and was elected the Member for Nairobi South.
Mbiyu Koinange, Kenya’s first African degree graduate, Dr Gikonyo Kiano, and Dr Njoroge Mungai, a General Practitioner, had toted up their work experience in peripatetic exile, with Kiano returning in the 1950s and joining politics.
Koinange’s years of exile had taken him from America to Britain and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, where, as head of the Bureau of African Affairs, he engaged with such luminaries of the anti-colonial struggle as Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.
However, even in the United States, home of presidential cabinets, the body of the most senior appointed officers of the executive branch of the government is not announced in one fell swoop before the vetting and simple majority vote by Congress in each and every case is done.
Even with the formation of the parliamentary vetting committee Kenyans will still have to endure a waiting game before the grand unified, one-stop announcement of the 18 Cabinet secretaries and their Principal secretaries. The new style PS nominees are themselves being processed by way of vetting by the Public Service Commission.
United States founding President George Washington founded modern government by Cabinet. He appointed a Cabinet of four officers – Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. To this day this is the order of seniority and clout in the US Cabinet – these are the Big Four.
RETIRING THE ICC FACTOR?
With the formation of a Cabinet in which the Central Kenya hegemony factor is so understated, President Uhuru has a rare and historic chance to make a real difference.
He is the wealthiest newly incoming Head of State and Government in this country and the one with the longest perspective in terms of hindsight of where the others went wrong.
He is one of the country’s major investors and therefore has a stake in the success of the economy like none of his predecessors. So far, he is giving out all the vibes of a true pragmatist with a genuine desire to turn over a new leaf for Kenya.
It is going to be essential for both Uhuru and Ruto to show unstinting commitment to the reform process and to establish bilateral and multilateral ties around the globe that truly transcend their status as indictees of the International Criminal Court.
In fact, the more the Kenyan economy booms and the more the reform process is rolled under these two, the more the ICC process will seem like an inflexible and insensitive excrescence diverting Kenyans’ attentions from a real case of reconciliation, national healing and nation building.
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