By Oginga Randiki
Time to Redefine For Kenya’s Institutional Architecture, Legislative And Administration Frameworks.
It has been five weeks since Mr. William Ruto who is the deputy president of the Republic of Kenya ruling publicly announced that Mr. Raila Odinga the Opposition Leader has hatched a plot to have him expelled from Jubilee where he is the deputy party leader, but Ruto is still basking in the afterglow.
On his tour of Western region last week, he stopped off at Bungoma county and said the constitutional amendment was the work of idlers. But beneath the honhomie lies unease. Jubilee’s creaky hustlers spent the whole first five years term blaming Raila for all Kenya’s woes. Ruto made Raila and NASA leaders look like the subsidies that make borrowing foreign loans irresistible need that must be phased out.
Now he resists the handshake with its intent on Constitutional amendment for fear of being overrun. He has engaged in an active and highly costly premature 2022 election which he narrowly and shallowly disguise as ‘development activities’. Yet the result for most ordinary Kenyans is not too much change but too little or none at all in priority areas. Kenya is poorer than when Ruto was out of government.
Doctors and University dons earn peanuts. The ruling party is a passive witness to the shortage of food and other basics. It is unable to help bring down the soaring cost of food and other basics. The distorted and fraudulent borrowing of foreign loans has caused unprecedented high taxes that caused the death kernel of the entrepreneurial middle class.
Ruto and his treasury mandarins have destroyed many qualities of foreign debts. One of the prime qualities of foreign debt is allowing the State to invest and citizens to benefit today from tomorrow’s income. But the grand corruption of which Ruto is reported as being perceived by Kenyans as its leading star,has destroyed the economy and tilted the development of Kenya in a woeful direction.
The National treasury for the first time, since the independent day has created a financial system that is deliberately prone to crises and biased against productive investment. It has destroyed national development and reduced economic growth and worsened inequality in our country.
Raila Odinga and ODM really had no option but to support the Finance Bill 2018. He fully understands the fact that economy biased towards debt are more prone to crises because debt imposes a rigid obligation to repay on vulnerable borrowers.
The repay crisis remains, in large part, because of theft, waste and misappropriation of foreign loans. If the attempts to getting rid of theft of foreign loans by state officials are overwhelmingly futile, the path to its eliminating tax crises to repay debts could hardly be more rocky.
It must be clearly understood that leaders like Ruto who in their public life, have never drawn and respected national code of ethics capable of inspiring national actions and infusing them with the highest meaning, like Raila did with 2010 constitution,mostly do not much like constitutional changes that will remove their hands from the national economic gullet that they hold with tight grip and only release when they wish.
Such leaders are themselves an insurmountable obstacle to development and fear any instrument that will instill the spirit of true solidarity in diversity and responsibility and provide a foundation for the new collective disciplines that are taking shape due to the handshake. It is time to redefine Kenya’s institutional architecture, legislative and administrative frameworks.
To the Team ‘Tanga Tanga’ the handshake must be destroyed for it serves as the ideal and the moral backbone for national good governance which they do foster. History teaches us that leaders who depend heavily on public coffers to promote their personal vested interests will be ready to spend some of the looted billions on lobbying to defend status quo.
Whenever, arguments about constitutional amendment arises, the vested interests of the ilk of Ruto which are passed off as national development, will bleat loudly. To Ruto, the widespread poverty, extreme poverty and hunger which, for a leader like Raila are all obstacles to respect for people’s fundamental liberties, for they affect the dignity of human beings and their capacity for self-realization are mere issues to be left for idlers.
Raila understands more clearly that true development is dependent upon respect of law, the quality of justice and the stability and effectiveness of the constitutional framework for investment. He further understands that in order for the 43 Kenyan tribes to mobilize around a national development strategy, they must feel confident that everyone will be able to enjoy the just rewards of their labours.
Again, Raila, has promptly realized that in our country, even with the 2010 constitution, the law, protection of the weak and most vulnerable, and the basis for security of economic exchanges, political representation, political participation and executive power are poorly structured, respected or non-existent.
It is therefore legitimate for the national leadership to devote a growing part of its resources to assist citizens wishing to amend their constitution in order to consolidate their institutions. This is the only vaccine that will end the scandal of an evil whose victims are more numerous in the Rift Valley and for which the medicines are in the Central and Nyanza.
History teaches us that leaders who depend heavily on public coffers to promote their personal vested interests will be ready to spend some of the looted billions on lobbying to defend status quo.
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