State House not quite sincere about China trip, signed deals

President Uhuru Kenyatta with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. [Xinhua]

For as long as the media was reporting that President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga were off to China to secure funding for the second phase of the SGR from Naivasha to Kisumu, State House didn’t see the need to retract those claims.

Perhaps not keen to contradict the former PM, State House chose to remain silent. In fact, it was Raila who announced last month that he was accompanying the president to the Asian country to negotiate the funding.

The razzmatazz that greeted President Yoweri Museveni’s state visit to the country last month must have been choreographed to send a signal to Beijing on the viability of the project. Alas, that didn’t convince the Chinese to open their purse to finish President Kenyatta’s pet project.

It requires Sh368 billion to construct the 270km second phase  from Naivasha to Kisumu; money that Mr Odinga- a critique of the Sh300 billion Mombasa-Nairobi line- said would come from Chinese loans.

It was only after Kenyans greeted  news of a deal to export avocado, instead of the SGR extension loan with indignation that State House Chief of Staff Nzioka Waita attempted to clarify there was no such thing as a deal for the new SGR line.

That came rather too late, the damage had already been done. The fiasco of whether there was a deal or not, or whether the trip was about the SGR extension or not, are the obvious pitfalls of lack of information. Lies travel faster than truth. Why didn’t State House do a rebuttal on the former PM’s assertions? Yet since the start of his second term in late 2017, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s itinerary on foreign trips has been shrouded in secrecy with media being “spoon-fed” by periodic updates from the PSCU team. No media house accompanies the president on such trips in spite of their being a State House Reporters’ pool on standby.

Moreover, when the opportunity to accompany the Head of State outside the country like happened last week occurs, media houses are asked to foot half the bill. This is not priority expenditure for media houses in these tough business times.

Worst of all, like the rest of the country, media wakes up to news of the president’s arrival at his destination the next day. Social media updates that were frequent in the first term suddenly stopped. There might be legitimate reasons for the news “blackout”, but surely, aren’t there better ways to circumvent challenges, if any?

On Friday, the PSCU team scrambled to correct a misstated figure for a deal to fund the construction of Konza Smart Cities and the JKIA-James Gichuru Road expressway. An alert from the PSCU team had said that the president had witnessed the signing of a Sh226 billion deal between Kenya and China for the two projects.

This was revised later to Sh67 billion. There were implausible attempts to attribute it to a rounding-off error. The margin of error was so huge to miss. Nature abhors a vacuum, more so when it comes to information. State House can do better to avoid rumours and innuendo from spreading.

If nothing else, the fact that these deals are binding on all Kenyans and that it will be the taxpayer picking the bills after these transactions should compel the president’s handlers to share more details of his trips. Feeble attempts to indirectly portray media as sensational, even incompetent, will not wash.