A letter of solidarity with the Cabinet Secretary for Health Susan Nakhumicha

Dear, Hon Susan Nakhumicha.

We have seen the video of you at a press conference standing behind the Head of Public Service, looking like you have not been sleeping well lately. We hope this letter finds you well, even when we know it will not.

Lately, you have been shuttling between media houses issuing threats to professionals in the curative health sector reminding them how their full-time fate can be dissolved by the ink of your sharp pen.

Finally, a Cabinet Secretary has come out to give President William Ruto the desperate need to reshuffle his clueless Cabinet. We thank you for putting your head on the chopping block to save the government of Dr William Ruto from going down. Kenyans will remember you when we get to Paradiso.

You know, Ms Nakhumicha, for a long time we have been wondering who among your Cabinet colleagues had the guts to cross the red line of leadership and start acting in a manner likely to suggest they don’t care about the enormous responsibilities that came with being in Cabinet.

Public Service CS Moses Kuria has always come closest to running his mouth out of a job but every time he dips his feet in fire, he always feels the signs and tracks back in time to save himself from being relieved of government largesse.

Even when we have egged him on to make good his threat of going to release pellets of urea from his digestive tract at the door of one of our former First Ladies, he has always known the limit of free speech and costly action.

While many might argue that Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has also shown some glimpses of cheapening the presidency and antagonising national cohesion with his public utterances, the son of Mau Mau has also been cautious not to shave his head with his words.

Which is why we write to you today, Ms Nakhumicha, thanking you for finally volunteering to be the Cabinet Mouse that found the elusive courage to bell the cat when your other colleagues chose cowardice.

On this doctors’ strike, be comforted knowing that the entire country is behind you – fully, unequivocally, and in all respects. Those doctors who have been daring you with firing them think you were made of papier-mache as to dissolve when dipped in hot water.

Time has come for you to remind them that you’re the proud daughter of two police officers, and you grew up sleeping with guns in your bedroom like a pillow. While those doctors were busy lighting mosquito coils to smoke mosquitoes out of their dimly-lit prefabricated campus rooms that had no filters, all you needed to scare mosquitoes was to point your father’s gun at their perch and the mosquitoes would pass out the blood they had siphoned from your veins in fear. Since then, those who look at you with bad eyes have learned not to play around with your menacing attitude for fear of suffering the fate of those mosquitoes on your childhood wall.

In fact, had you not pursued an online degree in pharmacy from a university whose name is difficult to pronounce, you would have been our Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security since you grew up knowing how to clean guns and other ammunition that protect Kenyans from harm’s way.

It is no wonder when you once stormed a burial at Matisi Corner and threatened to fire the Officer Commanding Station (OCS) there, the locals cheered you on because when they compare you with your Interior Cabinet colleague they could see someone who finally bandits in the North Rift could be scared of just by looking at them eyeball-to-eyeball.

By escalating the current war with medics, Ms Nakhumicha, you have proved to the President that you are the only Cabinet Secretary who can threaten public servants working in her docket and get away with it, because leadership is not about the place where you got your certificate, and no one should bring for you. This carefree bravado is the reason the hustler movement swept to power in the 2022 general elections.

As for those questioning whether you actually went to school like all of us, or you skipped afternoon classes to go sing with the birds in Sikhendu, take it from us that those are people who are jealous of your success and all you need is to look at the caliber of your colleagues in Cabinet to know that you’re in the right place.

Ms Nakhumicha, everyone knows that the current Cabinet that you serve in is the most intellectually competent, ideologically grounded, and scholarly in outlook in the history of independent Kenya. You have a professor of law hired solely for his ability to lecture bandits on the legal implications of owning a gun without a license while reminding them that they will see fire when caught, not knowing that those bandits eat fire for breakfast. Even in America – which fashions itself as the only country where all dreams are possible – you can never find someone with an online degree in pharmacy being entrusted with the job of running the health ministry.

The hustler government was meant to be a government of the people for the people by the people, and you, Ms Nakhumicha, you’re the embodiment of that vision. Through your one government approach (OGA) to handling the crisis that afflict your docket, we have seen your colleagues coming to line up alongside you in press conferences wanting to steal the limelight from you after their inability to draw any crowd by themselves. Just yesterday, the Head of Public Service had to cut short everything he was doing to come bask in your glory in the dead of the night when it was clear you were going to take the credit for the doctors’ strike alone.

This our message of solidarity from all the seven corners of the country, urging you, Ms Nakhumicha, not to stop digging that hole you’re currently in and don’t forget us who stood by you when you finally strike gold underneath. If there is anywhere Nakhumicha Must Go to, it can only be to the Office of Deputy President in 2027.

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