Obstacles President Uhuru Kenyatta will face in his second term

As President Uhuru Kenyatta prepares to take the oath of office for his second and final term today, expectations among Kenyans are mixed: high and positive in the Jubilee Party camp but low and negative in the NASA camp.

Each side of the political divide has its reasons for optimism or pessimism. Yet both seem to be too focused on the short-term fixes hence overlooking our historical experience as a nation, which shows that Kenya’s socio-economic dilemma has been persistent since independence in 1963 and will outlive Uhuru’s second term.

At independence, the Government identified three key social evils that needed to be addressed - poverty, ignorance and disease; hunger would also be thrown into the mix later. Significantly, the Government had only nine million Kenyans among whom to resolve these challenges.

Some 53 years on, with a population of 47 million, these problems remain unsolved and, in fact, not only have they become more complex but also given birth to new ones: severe social-economic inequalities and injustices, corruption, impunity, marginalisation and systemic discrimination.

So the legacy for Uhuru must be what it is he can and should do about these dilemmas in the next five years. Instead of spending huge amounts of taxpayers’ money on high-flying projects such as the Standard Gauge Railway, it might be wiser for Government to focus on targeted forms of affirmative action programmes that benefit those in the lower segments of our social pyramid.

Or how else will the Jubilee government transform Kenyans’ lives without leaving anyone behind in the next five years?