UHURU ADMINISTRATION: A NIGHTMARE TO CIVIL SOCIETY GROUPS

By Isaac Meso

When President Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto were reading out the much-awaited list of cabinet secretaries, the anticipation that gripped the nation on that particular day reminded me of the former government when its little secrets could easily trickle into the hands of the media. Apparently, for the first time no media house had a scoop of ‘who was to be given what’ and all their frantic efforts boiled down to mere speculation as they too had to wait for the Commander-in-Chief and his deputy to read the final list of cabinet secretaries.

This was just a forewarning of how picking little secrets from the new government’s Pandora’s box would be a daunting task for the media in the future if this status quo is to be maintained. However that’s a story for another day.

Last week something happened in parliament that made me have a second thought on whether the civil society is going to make it through Uhuru’s administration.

After dangling a carrot in front of the opposition for a few days the Jubilee team, charged with tyranny of numbers in the house, made an ambitious move to take control of two key watchdog committees in the National assembly.

Impact of this move

Whatever Jubilee’s side did is very legal under the parliamentary rules now that they control the majority number in the house. However the implication of this is that the Uhuru administration can get away with any mega government scandal such as the famous Goldenberg scandal without much fuss and debate in the house.

This leaves parliament’s opposition wing, if there exist any, toothless and disoriented. It’s like snatching a bone from a puppy, the only thing it can do is groan and walk away. With parliament harmless and the media facing a rather hostile ground to operate on when it comes to keeping the government in check, all the attention shifts to the one and only messiah: the civil society.

However with what has been happening between the civil society and the ICC case, early signs indicate that the civil society should just go for what they asked for; a knife fight with Uhuru’s administration. The recent public utterances by state officials questioning donor funding of non-government organizations should send chills down the civil society groups. This might just be the tip of the ice berg of a mega plan to bring to an end this watchdog.

Another fight facing the civil society is their stand on the ICC cases. Apparently the owners of the land have a bone to pick with the civil society group who played quite a vital role in their prosecution at the International Criminal Court over the post poll violence that rocked the nation at the beginning of 2008.

While Chief Justice Mutunga and his crew work on their next move after one of his own filed an injunction to stop to the prosecution of Kamlesh Pattni over the Goldenberg scandal, Kenyans can only count on the civil society to save them from such levels of impunity that are still existent in our country, a new constitution notwithstanding. If the Uhuru administration succeeds in muffling the civil society, then Kenya will be no different from what it was during Moi’s era.