Post by Ed on Jan 24, 2006 7:49:31 GMT 3
Kenya is truly not a normal country
Jerry Okungu writes:
We live in a special country. This is no ordinary place you can find anywhere else especially when it comes to politics, poverty, crime and the judicial system.
Early this week, at a Pan African workshop in Addis Ababa, on governance in Africa, I asserted the same thing. People looked up to hear more what I meant. This was after some delegates had raved that Kenya's Peer Review process was flawed because it was government- led.
I say again here that this country is not a normal country. It is a place where contradictions and paradoxes are not in short supply.
This is the one country where contrasts are galore. It is not unusual to find that one part of the country has food stores over flowing and rotting while the other side is ravaged by famine. Yes, whereas in the same country, you will find super tourists and affluent locals exchanging pleasantries over deserts and expensive chasers from Italian and French wineries, our own kin are feeding on cactus leaves waiting to starve to death.
During the Christmas holiday, villagers spent endless hours trekking for miles on end looking for dear water with their jerry cans while a few chosen people were able to water their gardens and fill their swimming pools with this rare commodity.
Need we forget our annual tragic comedy every year, when our best young brains have scored the highest marks in national examinations, only to find that they cannot join the national schools they have been invited to just because they are too poor to afford it, when ministers and MPs from the same areas send their dim children to the best schools that money can buy?
Where else can you find an individual, whose highest academic qualification is primary six, leading a national political party, gets elected to parliament and actually gets appointed to the cabinet? Where else can an MP who never went beyond twelve years of schooling, lead a political party and actually turn down a presidential cabinet appointment unless her professor kinsman is also appointed to the cabinet?
These unusual things can only happen in Kenya.
This week will go in Kibaki's presidency as one of his best in terms of focus. This was the week President Kibaki gathered his top policy makers in the country and gave them a dress down. Like the Americans would want to say; he laid it down to them.
Watching him on television, the President was definitely in a foul mood. And he wasn't for joking. Something had annoyed him. He looked at his ministers, theirs assistants and permanent secretaries and felt sorry for them. He saw a bunch of people who had no business being in parliament let alone being in the cabinet.
He saw a bunch of people that Kenyans elected to parliament to make laws, yet after their appointments to the cabinet, forgot their first duty to the electorate, to attend parliamentary sessions. And the President was right to admonish his chosen few.
Yes, some of them had created their own parliaments by the road side, in funerals and at village weddings where they had decided they had unquestioning village audiences too cowed to take them to task. The more reason that every imaginable policy statement has of late been made by these people in market places, at funerals and in village feasts.
Let us face the fact here on the issue of non- performing members of parliament, otherwise known as Cabinet Ministers. It is true that Cabinet Ministers are political heads of their ministries in this country. But it is also true that the same ministers are not the accounting and administrative officers of their ministries.
We have well paid permanent secretaries and enough staff to do that. The role of a minister in the ministry is to help formulate ministerial policies, take them to parliament, debate them and turn them in to actionable laws.
Ministers are servants of the people, elected by the people. They are not civil servants. Therefore their first call of duty is to be in parliament, put the case of their constituents to the floor in terms of resource allocation and policies that will safe guard their constituents' basic human rights. Their job is to make sure that political promises made to the electorate at election time are delivered. It is their responsibilities as ministers to sit in the august house and answer all manner of questions from the backbenchers on their service delivery.
Perhaps at this juncture, it may be opportune to give President Kibaki an unsolicited idea on how to deal with his non- performing ministers. The first thing that he should do is to lump them together with chairmen of corporate companies and government parastatals.
This will mean they have no offices in their ministries. They will only go there on consultations from time to time. They will have no official drivers and body guards from their ministries. They will have no time to breathe over the necks of their permanent secretaries and other civil servants, nor interfere with the affairs of their ministries. This way, they will spend more time in their bunge offices which are now gathering dust or are currently rented out to their relatives for private business activities.
The other way of dealing this group of MPs is to peg their salaries to the numbers of sittings when parliament is in session. The more sessions they attend and the more questions they answer in parliament, the nearer they move to their full monthly pay. The less sessions they attend, unless it is on point of illness or official business abroad, the more pay cut they must suffer. The other way of dealing with this situation is to revert to the Ghai earlier recommendation in the Draft Constitution that had stipulated that elected members of parliament would remain just that. The document advocated for separation of duties. The cabinet would be chosen from non- elected professionals through a vetting process conducted by parliament. What this means is that cabinet ministers would be full time employees of the government in power while MPs would be full time members of parliament, earning their dues depending on their sittings in parliament.
As the President was talking at the School of Monetary Studies this week two contradicting scenes were on display. As he spoke of service delivery to the people, of famine ravaging the country, it was easy to detect a bunch of well fed fat cats with shining faces all over. Worse still, the occasion gave the whole world a very ugly image of Kenya.
Each of the Ministers and Permanent Secretaries drove in a state of the art limousine imported from a donor country at the local tax payer's cash! Or is from the same donor's purse? Common sense would have made it unwise to display such wastage of public resources on an occasion when these cats knew the press would be on the prowl!
Would it have been too difficult for each ministry's Minister, Assistant Minister and Permanent Secretary to ride in one car to the venue, just in the outskirts of the city center? Was it necessary to display this opulence at a time when our President is going around with a bowl in his hands begging for relief food for starving Kenyans?
Yes, Kenya is truly not a normal country. This is the only country where you will find prisoners winning beauty contests even if they are on death row. It is the same country where prisoners condemned to life sentence have become headmistresses in prison schools and are doing wonders? Now the question to ask is this, are there hair saloons and beauty parlors in prison, Uncle Moody?
Right now if you look at the life style in prison, it is definitely better than the life many street urchins and street families live outside here. Little wonder that crime rate has shot up in Kenya. Prison is now the in-thing, the place to be for free goodies and better life, free from monthly family budgets, rent headaches, electricity bills, waters bills and endless school fees and uniforms. No wonder when our generous convicts saw on their color television sets that famine had broken out in Kenya, they forwent a full day meal to donate the same to starving Kenyans!
This brings me to my next point. How come this famine thing in Kenya has touched the hearts of our prisoners and ordinary Kenyans like me yet we have yet to hear the same emotional reaction from our Ministers, MPs, judges, top civil servants, the diplomatic community- more so their always compassionate house wives, the armed forces and local councillors all over the country? Is it possible that we have come to a point where the richer you become the less giving you become?
Where are our mainstream churches that are fond of giving beautiful sermons about good neighborliness yet when their flock face death by starvation they keep mum? Or is it because the poor and the dying belong to their lot and have nothing to give to the house of God?
Yes, this is truly a land of many abnormalities. It is the only country where an anti-corruption tzar can be appointed on a salary higher than that of the President, and goes on to stay in office for two years without a single prosecution in the face of rampant corruption, yet still publicly claim to be fighting the vice!
Do you remember what Musikari Kombo and Charity Ngilu did the other day, when their kinsmen were not included in the cabinet in good numbers? If you do, now you know that we live in no ordinary country. We live in Kenya.
Jerry Okungu writes:
We live in a special country. This is no ordinary place you can find anywhere else especially when it comes to politics, poverty, crime and the judicial system.
Early this week, at a Pan African workshop in Addis Ababa, on governance in Africa, I asserted the same thing. People looked up to hear more what I meant. This was after some delegates had raved that Kenya's Peer Review process was flawed because it was government- led.
I say again here that this country is not a normal country. It is a place where contradictions and paradoxes are not in short supply.
This is the one country where contrasts are galore. It is not unusual to find that one part of the country has food stores over flowing and rotting while the other side is ravaged by famine. Yes, whereas in the same country, you will find super tourists and affluent locals exchanging pleasantries over deserts and expensive chasers from Italian and French wineries, our own kin are feeding on cactus leaves waiting to starve to death.
During the Christmas holiday, villagers spent endless hours trekking for miles on end looking for dear water with their jerry cans while a few chosen people were able to water their gardens and fill their swimming pools with this rare commodity.
Need we forget our annual tragic comedy every year, when our best young brains have scored the highest marks in national examinations, only to find that they cannot join the national schools they have been invited to just because they are too poor to afford it, when ministers and MPs from the same areas send their dim children to the best schools that money can buy?
Where else can you find an individual, whose highest academic qualification is primary six, leading a national political party, gets elected to parliament and actually gets appointed to the cabinet? Where else can an MP who never went beyond twelve years of schooling, lead a political party and actually turn down a presidential cabinet appointment unless her professor kinsman is also appointed to the cabinet?
These unusual things can only happen in Kenya.
This week will go in Kibaki's presidency as one of his best in terms of focus. This was the week President Kibaki gathered his top policy makers in the country and gave them a dress down. Like the Americans would want to say; he laid it down to them.
Watching him on television, the President was definitely in a foul mood. And he wasn't for joking. Something had annoyed him. He looked at his ministers, theirs assistants and permanent secretaries and felt sorry for them. He saw a bunch of people who had no business being in parliament let alone being in the cabinet.
He saw a bunch of people that Kenyans elected to parliament to make laws, yet after their appointments to the cabinet, forgot their first duty to the electorate, to attend parliamentary sessions. And the President was right to admonish his chosen few.
Yes, some of them had created their own parliaments by the road side, in funerals and at village weddings where they had decided they had unquestioning village audiences too cowed to take them to task. The more reason that every imaginable policy statement has of late been made by these people in market places, at funerals and in village feasts.
Let us face the fact here on the issue of non- performing members of parliament, otherwise known as Cabinet Ministers. It is true that Cabinet Ministers are political heads of their ministries in this country. But it is also true that the same ministers are not the accounting and administrative officers of their ministries.
We have well paid permanent secretaries and enough staff to do that. The role of a minister in the ministry is to help formulate ministerial policies, take them to parliament, debate them and turn them in to actionable laws.
Ministers are servants of the people, elected by the people. They are not civil servants. Therefore their first call of duty is to be in parliament, put the case of their constituents to the floor in terms of resource allocation and policies that will safe guard their constituents' basic human rights. Their job is to make sure that political promises made to the electorate at election time are delivered. It is their responsibilities as ministers to sit in the august house and answer all manner of questions from the backbenchers on their service delivery.
Perhaps at this juncture, it may be opportune to give President Kibaki an unsolicited idea on how to deal with his non- performing ministers. The first thing that he should do is to lump them together with chairmen of corporate companies and government parastatals.
This will mean they have no offices in their ministries. They will only go there on consultations from time to time. They will have no official drivers and body guards from their ministries. They will have no time to breathe over the necks of their permanent secretaries and other civil servants, nor interfere with the affairs of their ministries. This way, they will spend more time in their bunge offices which are now gathering dust or are currently rented out to their relatives for private business activities.
The other way of dealing this group of MPs is to peg their salaries to the numbers of sittings when parliament is in session. The more sessions they attend and the more questions they answer in parliament, the nearer they move to their full monthly pay. The less sessions they attend, unless it is on point of illness or official business abroad, the more pay cut they must suffer. The other way of dealing with this situation is to revert to the Ghai earlier recommendation in the Draft Constitution that had stipulated that elected members of parliament would remain just that. The document advocated for separation of duties. The cabinet would be chosen from non- elected professionals through a vetting process conducted by parliament. What this means is that cabinet ministers would be full time employees of the government in power while MPs would be full time members of parliament, earning their dues depending on their sittings in parliament.
As the President was talking at the School of Monetary Studies this week two contradicting scenes were on display. As he spoke of service delivery to the people, of famine ravaging the country, it was easy to detect a bunch of well fed fat cats with shining faces all over. Worse still, the occasion gave the whole world a very ugly image of Kenya.
Each of the Ministers and Permanent Secretaries drove in a state of the art limousine imported from a donor country at the local tax payer's cash! Or is from the same donor's purse? Common sense would have made it unwise to display such wastage of public resources on an occasion when these cats knew the press would be on the prowl!
Would it have been too difficult for each ministry's Minister, Assistant Minister and Permanent Secretary to ride in one car to the venue, just in the outskirts of the city center? Was it necessary to display this opulence at a time when our President is going around with a bowl in his hands begging for relief food for starving Kenyans?
Yes, Kenya is truly not a normal country. This is the only country where you will find prisoners winning beauty contests even if they are on death row. It is the same country where prisoners condemned to life sentence have become headmistresses in prison schools and are doing wonders? Now the question to ask is this, are there hair saloons and beauty parlors in prison, Uncle Moody?
Right now if you look at the life style in prison, it is definitely better than the life many street urchins and street families live outside here. Little wonder that crime rate has shot up in Kenya. Prison is now the in-thing, the place to be for free goodies and better life, free from monthly family budgets, rent headaches, electricity bills, waters bills and endless school fees and uniforms. No wonder when our generous convicts saw on their color television sets that famine had broken out in Kenya, they forwent a full day meal to donate the same to starving Kenyans!
This brings me to my next point. How come this famine thing in Kenya has touched the hearts of our prisoners and ordinary Kenyans like me yet we have yet to hear the same emotional reaction from our Ministers, MPs, judges, top civil servants, the diplomatic community- more so their always compassionate house wives, the armed forces and local councillors all over the country? Is it possible that we have come to a point where the richer you become the less giving you become?
Where are our mainstream churches that are fond of giving beautiful sermons about good neighborliness yet when their flock face death by starvation they keep mum? Or is it because the poor and the dying belong to their lot and have nothing to give to the house of God?
Yes, this is truly a land of many abnormalities. It is the only country where an anti-corruption tzar can be appointed on a salary higher than that of the President, and goes on to stay in office for two years without a single prosecution in the face of rampant corruption, yet still publicly claim to be fighting the vice!
Do you remember what Musikari Kombo and Charity Ngilu did the other day, when their kinsmen were not included in the cabinet in good numbers? If you do, now you know that we live in no ordinary country. We live in Kenya.