The twelve months that will make or break Uhuru’s legacy

President Uhuru Kenyatta (pictured) enters into the New Year conscious of the fact that the year marks the midpoint in the last term of his Presidency.

His biggest test in the subsequent 18, or so, months will be to focus on an ailing economy and the war against corruption. Besides, he must send a clear signal that he intends to retire in August 2022, in faithfulness to the Constitution. 

If he should appear intent to carry on beyond 2022, then he must prepare for new frontiers of the battle against friends and foes alike.

While in all he has 32 months to retirement, he must make robust impact within the next 18 months. The rest will be the homestretch to August 2022. Matters will be very much out of his hands and control.

Frustration and despair

The war against corruption will be a major thorn in the flesh of a President who has often given signs of frustration and despair.

Towards the end of his first term, President Kenyatta was known to lament and show signs of desperation. He would crossly wring his wrists in public with the declamation, “Good people, what do you really want me to do (Jameni nifanye aje)?”

To his credit, he has since carried out some level of reform in the investigative and prosecutorial agencies, remarkably with changes at the very top of the Police Service, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC). 

The appointments of Inspector General of Police, Hilary Mutyambai, DCI boss George Kinoti and EACC Chief Executive Officer, Twalib Mbarak Abdallah, have delivered a welcome breath of fresh air against corruption. They each reported on duty with a sense of focused purpose and energy against corruption. 

Complicating matters in this fight, however, are the ever-degenerating relations between the Executive and the Judiciary. When the Supreme Court nullified his re-election in September 2017, an angry President promised to “revisit” the matter.

It appears that the matter is now being revisited, with budget cuts for the Judiciary and the President’s refusal to appoint or promote, up to 41 judges. 

Has the head of state possibly been misadvised, or has he spurned advice? In democracies all over the world, the Judiciary always has the last laugh. And the Kenyan Judiciary had begun laughing in the contestation for supremacy with the Executive.

Already, the Court of Appeal has closed down its operations in Mombasa, Nyeri, and Kisumu. More seems to be in the offing. For a fruitful 2020 and a lasting legacy in the engagement against corruption, the President may have to eat humble pie in the New Year. He has to revisit his position and attitude towards the Judiciary. If he doesn’t, he risks carrying an indelible egg on the face, way beyond the end of his tenure. 

President Kenyatta often talks about the Big Four Agenda as the axis of his expected legacy. Yet, it is hardly conceivable that he could make a resounding mark to constitute a legacy in what is left of his tenure.

The Big Four Agenda is about food security, health, housing, and manufacturing. The first three speak of how so low the Kenyan nation sits on the universally accepted Maslow hierarchy of needs. 

The country is lodged on the very lowest rungs of the hierarchy, grappling with famine in many parts – shifting now from devastations of drought to those of floods and back again, with both characterised with basic want.

The Galana-Kulalu Irrigation scheme that was in his first tenure billed as the magic wand to end-famine has all but embarrassingly flopped. With it have been sunk anywhere between Sh5.9 billion and Sh8 billion. The food item on the agenda can hardly walk, let alone blossom into the kind of stuff food legacies are made of.

Housing got off to a hard start, with questions and contestations on a housing levy on which the government has since backtracked. Its future remains in limbo. So, too, is health, with controversies on procurement of costly leased medical equipment that mostly lies fallow in hospitals across most of the 47 counties.

Manufacturing looks like good wishful thinking. The cost of energy in the country continues to be the biggest hindrance, with manufacturers taking flight to other countries in the region.

President Kenyatta must look elsewhere for legacy, and time is fast running out. The economy and the fight against corruption jointly offer him his best plank.

To achieve this, he will have to go beyond the appointments that were made in the anti-corruption agencies, to look around the people he has appointed and works with. He must show them the door, where they are complicit in corruption. 

The other strand of this effort will be in curbing the state’s unbridled appetite for borrowing. This year, Parliament raised the official borrowing ceiling from Sh. 6 trillion to Sh. 9 trillion.

The tragedy is that a lot of this money ends up in private pockets, through corrupt avenues. Those in the know have it that borrowing had already exceeded the Sh. 6 trillion ceiling. Parliament’s intervention may, therefore, have only been a rubber-stamp to regularise what had already taken place.

Still, President Kenyatta must pay keen attention to borrowing before it does further damage to the economy.

The Jubilee election campaign manifesto of 2017 is all but forgotten. One of the key promissory notes was  employment and inclusion of the youth into the national economy. State sources place unemployment at the end of 2019 between 9 and 10 percent.

Indicators are that this is set to rise in 2020, with more firms either scaling down on the workforce, or leaving the country altogether. 

Away from the economy, the President must deal with realpolitik. His party, Jubilee, is a cauldron of trouble. The post-2010 amity between the president and his Deputy, William Ruto, is undergoing the worst possible test between the President and his principal assistant in the history of the country.

The problem is that unlike in the old days, the President cannot dismiss his deputy. 

Under the 2010 Constitution, President Kenyatta’s hands against Ruto are effectively tied. He can, therefore, only show signs of dissatisfaction with him and throw hints, invective, and innuendo. But he cannot get rid of him singularly.

To remove Ruto, he would have to orchestrate an impeachment process – something that could only exacerbate matters. President Kenyatta must in 2020 find a way of engaging constructively with his deputy, as part of giving himself enough room to work in. 

If the President does not mend fences with his deputy, then he must find a way to tame him. It is not easy to see how this could be done. Yet if he does neither, he must reckon with an ever-expanding constituency of dissent in his own backyard in Central Kenya. In the absence of any fresh political heavyweight in the region, Ruto remains the favourite. 

President Uhuru faces a delicate balancing act between traveling amicably with his deputy and his followers through 2020, on the one hand, and with the ODM leader Raila Odinga, on the other.

When the President engaged his famous handshake with Raila, the mutual political hostility that existed between the two found new lodgings between the ODM Leader and the Deputy President. The big riddle for President Kenyatta, who needs calm as he navigates his way through the next two years, is how to walk with the two.

Succession game

The animus between the Deputy President and the ODM leader is, of course, about 2022 succession. The President often comes down heavily on those he says are engaged in a premature succession game. His petitions have fallen on deaf ears. It is unlikely that he could stop them in 2020, with the year of reckoning ever closing in. If anything, they will only go to a new high. 

In all this, President Kenyatta will do well to recognise that he will increasingly represent the past, while the contenders for his office represent the future. Even his most ardent followers and supporters will want to secure their future, by backing the right tree. The year 2020, therefore, marks the start of a very delicate tight rope for President Kenyatta.

Will President Kenyatta hack it – with a contentious Building Bridges Initiative, an ailing economy, an unhappy and rebellious Judiciary and a hungry country impatient for reform? He will need to be extremely level-headed and to have about him wise men and women of goodwill.