Mr President, clean the stables and no taskforces

President William Ruto signs the IEBC Bill into law at the KICC on July 9, 2024. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

Committees, so said a wag, are a bunch of people, individually incapable of doing anything but who, as a group, can meet and decide nothing can be done.

They are also infamously credited with taking a perfectly good idea into an alley and strangulating it to death.

Now, in Kenya, we are good at forming committees whenever the government want to buy time and hope people will forget the issue. It is what giraffes have perfected; bury your head in the sand and hope the problem will disappear.

Such committees come in various disguises: Taskforce; Commission of Inquiry; Board of inquiry etc. The common trait with these groups is that by the time they are through with their ‘work’, the people will usually have forgotten why they were formed in the first place. Of course, members of the Taskforce, led by the Chairman, will make a big fuss when presenting the perfectly bound report to the President for safe keeping in the archives. And that will be that. In most cases however, many of the things these committees are supposed to do can usually be done by some government employee paid to do the work.

Because of the recent demonstrations and newly found activism by the youth, we expect a couple of taskforces and committees soon. The main one I see coming is on government expenditure. We don’t have to set up a committee on this: I can volunteer to be a one-man committee to delve into this matter. There are just too many low hanging fruits we can start with and save the government a load of cash.

Let’s start with the government expenditure on itself. For instance, we just have too many legislators and Cabinet Secretaries, each consuming a good chunk of the budget.

On the latter, I find it ridiculous to see CSs on the roads with gas guzzlers, banshees wailing, with security men in cheap suits waving police handsets menacingly at other motorists. Why does a CS need three cars on the road? Why are they always in a hurry? Why the disregard for those who pay their inflated wages?

I remember former President Uhuru Kenyatta, when he was minister of finance, had proposed – and implemented for a short while – buying of vehicles with engine size not exceeding 1800cc. A couple of VW Passats were purchased.

I always imagine his fellow ministers and bureaucrats in charge of acquiring government vehicles tittering and whispering behind his back: “look at this one; he has no clue how the government works. Give him time and he will become part and parcel of the bureaucracy.” And it came to pass. We were back to good old days of gas guzzlers.

Sometimes, I look at the composition of our leaders – elected and nominated. There are socialites who show off their newly acquired cars, posting juvenile videos on TikTok intoxicated while others are on Instagram shaking their bums to some vernacular music.

And then we have Senator Crystal Asige, a lady so articulate and intellectually astute that you ask which god we need to give a sacrifice for more of such leaders.

It’s never too late to make these changes, however. The President needs to clean his Augean stables. The Augean stables rhymes well with draining the swamp which has made popular with the Gen Z. The Augean stables were said to have contained the manure that had accumulated over 30 years from the king’s 3,000 cattle. According to the fable, Hercules promised to clean up the stable in a day, and he did it by diverting a river through the stables. It is time we diverted our own river and cleaned the stables.

Fortunately, the president has the best opportunity to do that now. Because of the recent street activities, he has essentially been given a mandate to make drastic changes in government without looking at the tribal dynamics. You can appoint competent and untainted people to run the ministries and tackle the ingrained corruption, listen to the Auditor General and live within our means. And no, we don’t need taskforces, Mr President.

-The writer is a journalist and communications consultant