When Covid-19, BBI politics meet

As Covid-19 cut a path through Kenya, slowly, President Uhuru Kenyatta started doing something very interesting — which was easy to miss.

At appearances to speak on actions the government was taking to tackle the pandemic, he would say the decisions he was announcing had been made in consultation with health experts and county governors. Then he started saying future actions would be announced after consultation with the governors.

In the counties, from Mombasa, Meru, to Kisumu, actions by governors, including building up hospital capacities, testing and, controversially, sealing off their counties to neighbouring ones that weren’t doing enough to combat the virus, increasingly became the top stories in the fight against the coronavirus.

On social media, county partisans proudly propagated the achievements of their governors and, before long, some were saying that Governor X would make a better president than Mr Kenyatta. 

It was unusual that a president would open the door for other politicians to share the stage in that way.

However, it is likely the President’s calculations were that he didn’t want to carry the political cost of Covid-19 alone. It is also easier to do that as a last-term president who isn’t too worried about another star emerging to challenge him at the next election.

Risen in prominence

If that was his intention, he succeeded. The way, the media now frames it, the most consequential meeting on Covid-19 is the one between the President and the Council of Governors (CoG).

The CoG itself has risen in prominence. For a Kenyan political organisation, it is surprisingly disciplined and fairly cohesive — a feat, considering how polarised the rest of the county’s politics is.

The CoG chairman, Kakamega Governor Wycliffe Ambetsa Oparanya, has risen in prominence. If he was fuller of himself, we would be seeing a lot more of him in the news.

And so it was that, at President Kenyatta’s most recent statements on the rising cases of Covid-19, he announced a series of actions and, significantly, that governors would take additional measures they deemed necessary for their counties.

Mr Oparanya came out to say that the governors had requested the President to take stricter measures than he eventually did.

They wanted the curfew moved forward to 9pm, the President pegged it at 10pm. They wanted the cessation of movement, they didn’t get it. The effect of it is that the President came across as pragmatic and the governors as more hardline on Covid-19, which was good for them.

As this was playing out, something that at first seemed unrelated happened: The final Building Bridges Initiatives (BBI) report was released. BBI is the child that was born out of the political détente between President Kenyatta and opposition chief Raila Odinga when they pecked each other on the cheeks and made up after their bruising 2017 contest for the presidency.

Its proponents say it aims to heal political wounds and end Kenya’s winner-take-all politics and violent elections.

BBI proposes, among other things, the position of Prime Minister and two deputy premiers and a meaty Leader of the Official Opposition docket. It increases the number of MPs and wrestles with the issue of better representation of women. And it bolsters the counties, giving them an even larger slice of the budget.

Given the latter, it begins to look that President Kenyatta’s inclination to the governors on Covid-19 might actually be a wider political pivot to the counties.

Consider what might happen should the BBI proposals pass in a referendum. Where now the president is king of the hill in the capital, with a deputy president, the top echelon of the Executive will grow three-fold. You will have the proverbial “more chiefs than Indians” scenario in Nairobi. And a gaggle of new MPs.

The only political executives whose power will remain untouched are the governors. And it will grow with a larger purse and the reality that, with a PM and two deputies, the power of the individual office holders could be diluted at the centre.

If the President — alone or in cahoots with Raila — has engineered all this stealthy remake of the State and the balance of power in it, his political dexterity has been grossly underestimated. If he hasn’t, and it all came together by happenstance, he is luckier than even he imagines.

Whatever the case, somebody seems not to have let the crisis born out of the 2017 election fiasco, and the pandemic, go to waste. Probably by mid 2021 the elite and the wealthy will be able to pay for expensive Covid-19 vaccinations for themselves.

The masses will begin to get something in early 2022 and the country will go back to the old ways. And the election will be up.

Probably, we are seeing Mr Kenyatta’s real succession plan: He might not be seeking a single powerful successor who protects his interests but so many of them holding small slices of power that not a single one of them can threaten them. Just saying.