Uhuru’s swift and efficient quest for political gratification

Swift and efficient. These ordinary adverbs acquired an ominous timbre when they were recently deployed in a most extraordinary public address as, incontrovertibly, the Head of State directly threatened the management of Kenyatta University, and specifically its admirably steadfast and conscientious vice-chancellor.

Redolent of Thomas More faced with the rampant and wrathful Henry III in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.

When the professors did not budge in the face of an oral presidential decree, the Cabinet Secretary for Education purported to sack and replace them, but the substitute administrators all declined their appointments.

Swift and efficient is a variation of another mantra of Kenyatta’s hell-for-leather legacy era, ‘ruthless efficiency’.

In the second term, Kenyatta lived up to his sidekicks’ ominous hints that Kenyans would encounter a more autocratic Kenyatta after the 2017 election.

Indeed, consecutive executive orders abundantly evinced this resolve, as the President reconfigured his executive to align the state with his will, and annexe government as an appendage of his person.

Political delegation

A striking feature of this reconfiguration was the deliberate excision of the political delegation with whom Kenyatta had come to power and their replacement with unelected holders of immense bureaucratic or political power.

Elected officials are typically problematic in the sense that they project their constituencies’ expectations and make all manner of claims, legitimate or otherwise, thereby exerting forms of accountability that the executive cannot sustainably ignore.

The creation of ‘super-CSs’; Cabinet secretaries with far-flung mandates commanding colossal portions of the national budget, aided by colleagues invested with authority over instruments of violence, facilitated the coordination of the executive to complement this arrangement.

For the avoidance of misunderstanding, Kenyatta has had one super-CS, James Macharia, whose successive dockets singularly define the character of government expenditure and is always the focal point of all ‘legacy’ activity in ‘concrete’ terms.

Fred Matiang’i is Macharia’s principal enabler, public relations officer, enforcer and flack-catcher. The budget does not lie. Time is of the essence.

To execute a legacy as envisioned by Kenyatta in five years required miraculous genius or ghastly tyranny.

It is, therefore, no accident that the legacy term has been characterised by violence, arrests, curfews, extra-judicial killings, demolitions, evictions and other demonstrations of violent official impunity.

Brutal shortcuts

In the era of ruthless efficiency, the due process fell casualty as brutal shortcuts were normalised.

Politically, legacy came in the form of the Handshake and was swiftly reinvented as BBI.

Politicians who stood in the way were demolished or evicted and their followers endured horrendous ordeals in the hands of the implacable state machinery.

Just as the city expressway is a public-private partnership between government and business, BBI was a build-operate-transfer arrangement between the executive and a private citizen, Raila Odinga, which rescued Azimio from the jaws of catastrophic failure.

The extent to which due process was marginalised in Kenyatta’s second term is reflected in the torrential court actions against the government and deluge of judicial admonitions and adverse determinations, which earned Kenyatta and Odinga the nicknames Null and Void, fair and square.

The advent of new leadership in the Judiciary appears to have purchased some reprieve in the sunset of Kenyatta’s term.

A lot of swift and efficient decisions taken to facilitate the expeditious accomplishment of Kenyatta’s so-called legacy are liable for comprehensive judicial scrutiny in due course.

Many policy shortcuts engaged without due process in the same cause are similarly liable to be reviewed.

Immense damage has been inflicted on the safety, dignity, lives and livelihoods of the innocent.

Constitution violation

The capacity of our institutions to protect us and guarantee due process has been severely compromised.

The rule of law has been drastically curtailed, and the constitution flagrantly and repeatedly violated.

The foregoing form part of the true price Kenyans has had to pay for the swift and efficient pursuit of a legacy.

All told, the government has been more ruthless than efficient.

What we have got in return? Azimio and concrete monuments pale in comparison to all we have lost.

Just as capitalism does not internalise the cost of environmental damage, the devastation of communities, child labour and exploitation, the swift and efficient pursuit of legacy designates all its catastrophic effects as mere externalities.

The Juja meltdown then wasn’t just a presidential tantrum in high definition; the benevolent dictator foreshadowed in 2017 and the ruthless methods employed to achieve vain souvenirs were on full display.

The so-called all-of-government approach to project implementation is no more than a premeditated overriding of due process.

From the ruthless efficiency perspective, inbuilt controls and accountability mechanisms are irritating inconveniences and ‘red tape’ to be recklessly hewn away in pursuit of the quickest path to immediate political gratification.

Although constitutionally protected public land was involved, no reference whatsoever was made to the National Land Commission.

The professor is right. The government holds public land in trust for citizens.

In Juja, Kenyatta’s government was a rogue trustee.

Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno