Most Kenyans are familiar with efforts to impeach governors but less so efforts to impeach a Cabinet Secretary. This is not by accident, as the constitution envisions a President who appoints a competent Cabinet that is devoid of garden-variety corruption.
Yes, corruption and serving in government in any key position is inevitable, just as certain as a President appointing inept and incompetent politicians in his Cabinet.
Put another way, being corrupt or engaging in corruption is not and will never be a disqualifying factor for one to be appointed as a Cabinet member, and neither is it ever going to be the basis for removing one from that office.
Consider this: if corruption were a disqualifying factor for Cabinet appointments, Kenya could have already transformed into a thriving economy, on par with Western-developed countries or Singapore. This comparison is a stark reminder of our country's struggles, as Singapore and Kenya started at the same point of independence, yet Kenya has been left in the dust.
It is, therefore, pointless whenever these politicians engage in these exercises to impeach this or that governor and now trying to impeach a CS whose sin is probably not sharing the loot with the right people, assuming it’s true he got caught dipping his fingers in the cookie jar.
Ok, let’s not get too carried away with that for there is definitely one governor who was not only rightly impeached and good riddance, but he should also never have been near any office at all as a governor.
It is one thing to have an effective, competent administrator who knows a thing or two about how to run a government or government agency effectively but is corrupt nonetheless, and quite another thing altogether to have one who is incompetent, clueless and corrupt. The country, government or agency can survive the former but not the latter.
This is what we have going, albeit barely—a sprinkling of effective, competent ministers and now CSs who are also corrupt nonetheless. These ministers and now CSs have always carried the dead weight of the incompetent and corrupt serving in the Cabinet only because the President owes them some political debt and for no other reason.
That is what is wrong with the country and not these isolated cases mostly driven by hidden personal or political agendas in the name of impeachment.
At independence, our country’s first Cabinet had nine of its 15 members being former Alliance High School students, two others had studied at Maseno and another two were former Mang’u High School students. Nearly all the ones who attended Alliance also took diploma courses at Makerere College in Uganda.
The Tik Tok generation has no idea what those schools represented in terms of excellence and intellectual capacity. How Kenya has gone from those days where academic excellence and high quality education were synonymous with so many of our institutions and nepotism and tribalism notwithstanding. Many of those graduating from those schools and institutions went on to greatly contribute to the country’s development, be it in the government or private sector.
That cannot be said today and hasn’t been the case going back to the Moi administration when things started going south.
There is a jobless university graduate out there seeing some of these individuals serving in the Cabinet and going, surely; is it this bad or am I having a bad dream?
MP Wamboka has listed three grounds in the impeachment motion against Linturi: gross violation of the constitution or any other law, serious reasons to believe the CS has committed a crime under national law and gross misconduct. The allegations are about procurement and distribution of government subsidised fertiliser, which is believed to be fake to begin with.
These are very serious-sounding words, but that’s all there is to this. Words.
It is unlikely that Linturi will be voted out of office by Parliament.
But the Cabinet should dramatically sack nearly the entire team and start afresh with better quality members.