State must heed bishops clarion call to stem freefall into calamity

President William Ruto during Tangaza University graduation ceremony in Nairobi, on November 15, 2024. [PCS]

Kenya is sinking into the quicksand of disorder. It doesn’t matter that President William Ruto and the notables and grandees around him accept this or not. The National Executive and the Legislature are losing the citizens’ trust and respect. The Judiciary is in tow. There is an urgent need to stem the tide, restore order and regain trust and confidence in government.

This is the message from the Catholic Church. The full house of Kenya’s 29 Catholic prelates has sounded the conch. The State could listen and act. Alternatively, they could ignore, and surrender the nation to the free market of full-blown disorder, in the fullness of time. The bishops are telling State House that Kenya could go to the dogs.  They are advising the State to obviate this by getting the country back on the rails.

The space around power in ailing countries such as ours is usually occupied by hungry rent seekers. They are at once State captives and captors. They are not known to take well to the kind of statement the Church has issued. They will quickly coil into denial and issue-parrying. Predictably, therefore, the government is variously responding with mud slings and make-believe narratives. State operatives are posting levity and mockery in social media. Some accuse the bishops of ‘joining the Opposition’. Others have pulled out the card of ethnicity.

Regardless, the issues that the bishops have raised are real. Things were already bad before ODM eloped into the government through the backdoor. Matters have, however, got steadily worse from the advent of this “come we stay” marriage. Because Kenya Kwanza and their ODM allies now read from the same script, the attitude of the State towards everyone is brazenly disdainful and dismissive.

At the most civic level is the President, who accuses the Church of lying. His less sophisticated acolytes describe the men of cloth in appalling language and cartoons. This response speaks of a demographic that has lost the capacity to respect anything. They are not able to pause in their tracks to reflect on what a serious institution like the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops is telling them, in crisp and lucid language.

Kenya will probably go to the dogs, therefore. We may have to sink deeper yet, for the government is denying that dissenters are being silenced through abductions and torture. When State House ‘advices’ the bishops to ‘be truthful’, they suggest that Kenyans have imagined the abductions and disappearances. That the unending images of relatives bemoaning the disappearance of loved ones and perplexing discoveries of dead bodies are figments of our imaginations.

However, Gestapo-like abductions and disappearances by men in balaclavas are real. They point to an independent operation squad with a command centre outside the Kenya Police Service. It is charged with Kafkaesque assignments. Its role is to shock, awe and silence. Nobody is safe. Yet, times such as these are the seasons to be extremely unafraid. If not, the country will sink into tyranny. It is time to stand up to be counted for the country. The bishops have stood up. This column is doing so, too.  It is unafraid, extremely unafraid. God will protect us.

The bishops spoke of the mess in the health sector, following shoddy migration from NHIF to SHA. The situation is chaotic, and this writer has had first-hand experience with it. It is not too much to ask for expedited action here, for people are dying. There is evidence galore that SHA is a messy death trap. You cannot ask to “be given more time” in matters of life and death such as this one.

Devolution is on its knees, with counties starved of cash. There is reason to believe that there is a sinister hidden powerful hand in the stalemate between the National Assembly and the Senate on funding counties. Do they want to kill devolution as was done in 1965? Then the route was to starve the regional assemblies of cash. Is that the ploy again?

There are funds chaos in public universities. The government has turned its back on its collective bargaining agreement with the dons. Moi University and the University of Nairobi have their own additional chaotic issues, again with hidden powerful hands.  Elsewhere, CBC is a cauldron of confusion. Nobody knows where it is going, or how. The situation is chaotic in taxation, the food sector, security, healthcare, education, transport and communications, human rights, freedom to worship; in a word–everywhere is chaos. Meanwhile, government engages in make-believe town hall shows and sundry pressers. The need for Kenyans to be completely unafraid and engaged is obvious.

- Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke