Firing an entire cabinet in a presidential system is akin to firing yourself

Today’s state of our nation is such that we begin the 96th week of what should be a 256-week national leadership term for President William Ruto in an uncertain, even unstable, state of flux.  

As far as we know, Tuesday, July 16, 2024, opens a fourth week of Gen Z protests triggered by an unpopular Finance Bill, which is now a fully-fledged accountability revolution. 

For many right now, Gen Z is not just a generation, it is a demand to reboot Kenya by an unhappy majority. 

For the record, July 16 will be Day 707 since the last election, and Day 672 after the President’s official inauguration. It will also be Day 28 of a sequence of physical and online protests that did not take place daily while they were actually happening in real time. 

In our political minds, the next general election, on Tuesday 10th August 2027, would be 1,120 days, or 160 weeks, away. 

When, in response to the protests, the President dissolved Cabinet last Thursday, every fired CS had served a total of 623 days, or 89 weeks.  Looked at harshly, at the 3/8th stage in his term, President Ruto has not reported to work. Or, worse, that it’s time to “finish up and go”.  

Because in our presidential system of government of technical, not elected, ministers, firing your entire Cabinet sounds like you just fired yourself.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves. 

Remember the call for national dialogue which took a bipartisan twist this week as the IEBC law was signed?  And the promise of a “broad based political mechanism” to address current angst? 

We will come to the second later, but as far as we know, the dialogue (National Multi-Stakeholder Forum – NMSF) is to happen over the six days from Monday 15th July to Saturday 20th July 2024. 150 people are to be in attendance—50 youth and the remaining 100 from other stakeholder groups – on a “pay your own bills” basis in line with our austerity moment. 

As expected, the public response to this idea of dialogue on social media was aggressive and uncompromising, with calls for action, not talking, on everything from identifying, prosecuting and jailing corrupt public officers and trigger-happy police to ending nepotism and tribalism in public appointments. 

As said before, after BBI and NADCO, who wants yet more talking?  Other than the political elite on both sides of the divide who suddenly seem publicly irrelevant. 

Two days later, we got the infamous IMF presser.  To be clear, the material that was circulated across our media is the Kenyan “extract” from a wider press briefing by the IMF spokesperson.  

To be honest, the response to questions in the presser sounded very much like, “sorry that lives were lost, but the broader issue (beyond innocent human lives lost in public protests?) is that getting the macro-economic fundamentals right in places like Kenya is a balancing act”.  

To be explicit, the IMF’s tone-deaf answer also dodged the crux of the questioning, which was whether or not Kenya has reached out to the IMF to recalibrate or refocus the current program duration and/or targets in light of the Finance Bill protests.  

Let’s remember the 7th review of this program planned to slash total program financing once we were done repaying Eurobond I and still doesn’t have Board-level agreement, hence no 7th review report yet. 

What struck observers in these IMF remarks was their similarity with Ruto’s own recent statements in terms of arguments made and language used.  We should not be surprised.  The cost of their money in policy conditionality is the price we pay for our policy self-indiscipline. 

Which brings us back to the week’s highlight: the cabinet dismissal (bar one). In the 17-paragraph address the President made on Thursday, Kenyans were held in suspense until the 13th paragraph to sense that this would happen, which it did in the next dramatic one. 

Forgotten in the subsequent din was the earlier effort made to explain what this administration has done on its Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) on food production, education, social protection (cash transfers), credit access (Hustler Fund), affordable housing, manufacturing (aggregation and industrial parks, fresh produce markets, SEZs, local protection), digital transformation and universal health care. Or Harambees, with a new law now drafted. 

Equally forgotten was what was said in the next (15th) paragraph of the statement.  Consultations across sectors and political formations aimed at setting up a broad-based government. To assist in necessary, urgent and irreversible implementation of radical programmes to (a) deal with the debt burden (b) raise domestic resources (c) expand job opportunities (d) eliminate wastage and duplication across government agencies and (d) slay the dragon of corruption. Towards (e) a lean, inexpensive, effective and efficient government. 

Because the immediate public, political and media reaction has been to call for the immediate appointment of a fresh cabinet since it doesn’t currently exist, this latter paragraph offers five views of the orientation that any new Cabinet Secretary (CS) must bring to the role.  

On social media, we encounter the idea of joint (President and public/Gen Z) CS hiring with eight qualifying criteria (age, integrity record, judicial record, wealth declaration, humility, subject matter knowledge/domain experience, no relation to the President and no past in current and previous governments at CS or PS level) and five self-acceptance standards (accept public (including Gen Z) scrutiny, lower salary, smaller transport, no security and no priority in everyday traffic).  Notwithstanding the wider idea that this purge wasn’t enough, hence July 16. 

As we walk into the uncertainty of the coming week, is Kenya making any democratic progress or are we witnessing yet another rearguard political action in our low-trust society?  Most likely a bit of both.  These protests have humbled, even humiliated, our political class. 

Even though clearly taken by surprise and still sounding reluctant, President Ruto has correctly attempted responses to the demands he has faced, even when Kenyans have pushed back hard. 

Yet, the unvarnished truth is our leaders and citizens are still not on the same page.  Before we get to the elephant in the room - multiple killings, arrests and abductions of innocent citizens, not criminals, as this administration’s default, not exceptional, response to public protests. 

Is our 20th century political wavelength out of sync with our 21st century citizen bandwidth?  That’s a question as much for Kenya’s political class as it is for an IMF operating as if it is 1999.