Just when we thought governance was about to begin, politics gathers pace

President William Ruto visits his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta, at his family home in Gatundu on Monday, December 9, 2024. [PCS]

It’s hardly been a fortnight, but the lofty words we imbibed from the recent State of the Nation address about “listening and learning” already seem long forgotten in the minds of this Kenya Kwanza administration turned “broad-based government”.

Now we are told that Kenyans who railed against the Adani deals are not patriots but traitors in all but name. Remember, the term traitor first surfaced on June 25, during the Gen Z-led Finance Bill protests.

Then we hear that “pepo mbaya/chafu” (evil spirits) have infested our online space. To paraphrase one riposte on X, it’s taken two short years for our prayerful administration to teleport us into the realm of exorcism.

Lest we forget, it’s not everyday Kenyans who cancelled the Adani deals, it was the President. It’s the same thing with the 2024 Finance Bill; Kenyans didn’t withdraw it, he did.

On the other hand, presented with a “clean hands” government, no Kenyan wakes up planning to resist taxes which support universal social needs and inclusive economic opportunity, or investment towards opportunity’s enabling infrastructure. The simple ask is transparency, accountability and no theft.

More simply, one does not need to love their government to love their country. The proper hierarchy of democratic order should be people as principal, nation/country, state and finally government as agent. Our leaders have colonized us into the incorrect reverse of this.

In the same way that they have equally colonized us into equating the government with the economy.

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This administration is particularly Janus-faced in nature. For every speed bump encountered, the “double shuffle” is grudging initial acceptance followed by a return to factory settings. When, six months into office, they were faced with cost of living protests, the bipartisan Bomas dialogue (NADCO) offered a moment for consensus. NADCO’s impact today is the square root of zero.

Then we had those Gen Z protests which got the Finance Bill dropped and the cabinet fired before half of them were re-appointed in a broad-based arrangement that brought in members of the minority coalition that was the majority immediately post-2022 election.

Believing everything is back to normal, most of the bill was sneaked back through amendments, and it’s just been passed by Parliament. So much for “listening and learning”; “Finyaa!” is back on track!

Basically, Kenya Kwanza is saying they don’t do “wake-up calls”; or “listen-think and consult-act”. The official attitude sounds pretty much “if you are not with us, you are against us”! So, just 853 days after the August 2022 election, we already have a growing retinue of Kenyans gaining popular currency as our potential alternative leadership choices at the next election 974 days from now.

What likely began as opposition to this regime’s ideas, is now opposition to the regime as an idea. Just when we thought governance was about to begin, the politics has suddenly been accelerated. The real tragedy here might be that Kenya Kwanza has a fine policy agenda that it seems unable to implement with any semblance of basic competence. Maybe it’s the transactional leadership. Or poor sequencing.

Or bandwidth challenges across their policy champions (mostly CSs) and implementers (PSs, agency leaders). Or “business as usual” methods applied to a “business unusual” agenda. You can sense the mess through their ever-changing data: it’s literally impossible to get a single version of their truth, like say, how many jobs affordable housing has created.

You can see it in social media posts that speak to inputs and activities, not outputs and outcomes. It is also difficult not to suspect that there is little traditional public service buy-in to the agenda.

Meanwhile, the public is tired of the endless litany of promises. And no one is interested in hurriedly curated input and activity-level “performance scorecards” when daily lives, living and livelihoods are more difficult to sustain as “big people” live large.

In spite of my negative mood today, the funny thing is this Kenya Kwanza administration is only at the mid-point of what I have previously termed its three season, or semester, agenda.

To repeat, the first 18 month semester ran from September 2022 to March 2024. This was supposed to be the stabilization towards recovery semester.

The second, turnaround semester runs up to September 2025 and this month of December is its half-way stop, and the 27th month in a 54 month agenda. The third semester, to consolidate gains, runs till March 2027, five months to the next general election (Supreme Court appeal took out one out of the total of 60 months).

This administration is clearly not given to advice, but doesn’t this seem like the right moment for an honest mid-term review?

Step away from the daily proclamations from car sunroofs. Take a break from launching everything and nothing. Hit pause on the social media posts.

Hold back on the frequent flier miles. Take time to talk to, not at, people. Just for a week or so this December.

There are a million and one angles to this review. In seasons, how far did the semester 1 stabilization to recovery get, and where are we on semester 2 turnaround? Or on the “perfect economic storm” they inherited, are we building resilience, becoming more fiscally responsible or making progress in fixing the real economy? What about corruption, the Fourth Horseman of our Economic Apocalypse after global uncertainty, fiscal stress and our crony capital economy?

Of course there is BETA, and the need for an honest progress review on its six objectives – cost of living, food security, jobs/livelihoods, forex reserves, revenue base and inclusive growth – and five pillars – agriculture, MSMEs, healthcare, housing and digital/creative.

Across the five sectors/clusters – finance and production, infrastructure, social, environment and natural resources and governance and public administration and informed by the middle-income accelerators– human capital, markets, resources, digital and institutional reform.

But it’s more than this. Personnel quality aside (because personnel is policy), Kenya Kwanza’s fundamental thinking challenge – from ideation to communication – has been its inability to clearly set out what it sees as its picture of today (a baseline) and tomorrow (vision) in order to get everyone on board with the journey.

Baseline is not the same as context, and vision is not the same as concept. Take universal healthcare as an example.

We are sold context (NHIF is bad) and concept (SHA/SHIF is good) without an NHIF baseline (where we are today) and SHA/SHIF target/vision (where we are being forcibly taken). And that’s before the implementation chaos.

Of course, an honest mid-term review goes beyond the technical. Mostly, it must focus on the people, not the government.

So it’s about translating policy language into meaning for the people. How this review process will work is beyond my pay grade, but this is the right time for reflection.

It’s a moment to move from business as usual to business unusual. In Kenya’s business as usual tradition, 2025 is regarded as the last year to “do development” before political campaigns roll out in 2026.

In business unusual, after 27 months of politics, Kenya Kwanza has a chance to offer us 27 months of governance. Because governance, not economy, will be on the ticket in 2027.