Ni Sisi Kenya, a activist group for nationwide social movement uniting Kenyans to forge a collective identity to drive transformation in leadership and maisha.
Ni Sisi Kenya has issued a press statement just now calling out President Uhuru Kenyatta for taking advantage of COVID-19 pandemic to trash constitution, rule of law and democracy.
Dear Kenyans, Members of Press, After months of infighting, the Jubilee party lie has now broken into two bitterly opposed factions, one headed by President Uhuru Kenyatta and the other by his Deputy President William Ruto.
This fallout suggests an end to the compact on which the Jubilee party was founded, which is that Kenyatta and Ruto, who first ran for president with the adversity of the ICC charges, would support each other to rule for Kenya for two terms each, with the presidency thereafter rotating between their co-ethnics in perpetuity. The differences in Jubilee seem to emanate from the clashing views as to how the Kenyatta succession should be managed.
The growing acrimony in the Jubilee Party has been likened to the fallout of the ruling coalition NARC, which led to the factionalism in the 2005 constitution referendum.
The unresolved issues in the Coalition then played into 2007 election and were the source of violence.
If this comparison holds there is very deep reason to fear that 2022 could be a repeat of 2007 or worse with the mooted referendum providing a dress rehearsal as happened in 2005.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has used the Covid-19 pandemic as cover to extend his control over the state and has now established an administrative-security state.
The evidence of the administrative-security state includes the abrogation of the Nairobi City County, which has been replaced with a military outfit the so-called Nairobi Metropolitan Service.
The Nairobi Metropolitan Service is made up of eight active military top brass officials. In what looks like an attempt to perpetuate the hold of the military on the affairs of the city, the so-called Nairobi Metropolitan Service has now appointed a military official to be in charge of the Nairobi Water and Sewerage Services. The military has also taken control of the Uhuru Gardens which is under repair.
What is happening in Nairobi is not innocent:
Kenyatta has killed the idea of a political state, and has replaced this with a military state. Starting with Nairobi, Kenyatta is building towards establishing a military state over the entire country as an act of self-succession what Kenyatta now refers to a constitutional-change moment is designed to provide a constitutional anchorage to the militarized state militarized state that he has already created. The bigger context of the infighting in the Jubilee party and the purge in Parliament is to facilitate the actualization of the militarized state that Kenyatta is crafting as a form of self-succession.
The attacks on the Judiciary are a furtherance of this plan. Kenyatta desires a subservient Judiciary that will not stand in the way of his plans. The refusal to appoint the 41 judges as recommended by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), is an attempt to establish a context in which Kenyatta will arm-twist the JSC to appoint persons of his choice as the next Chief Justice and the justices of the Supreme Court.
The proposed constitutional amendment through the BBI process is aimed to weaponize the Constitution to, on the one hand, sweep away people that stand in his way, and, on the other, give him the kind of state he wants.
As Kenyatta takes advantage of Covid 19 crisis to engage in his political chess game and his nemesis fight back, the country’s electoral arrangements are in disarray.
The electoral commission that ran the 2017 elections, whose results suffered a historic nullification by the Supreme Court, lacks the legitimacy to run the next elections and will need to be replaced.
Going by history, replacing the current commission will be a hard-fought contest, which the ascendant political group will seek to delay as long as possible in order to weaken competing negotiating positions, with the idea to undermine the chances of a political consensus on how the next elections should be run, and presenting the country with a situation in which the next elections will be preceded by as little preparation as possible.
Amid the uncertainty resulting from its politics, the Covid-19 pandemic is a source of growing misery for the population. At the time of writing, the numbers of confirmed cases had climbed to 4952.
While Covid-19 has exposed Kenya’s fragile health infrastructure and the need for massive public investment in social services, succession politics seem to have robbed the Covid-19 pandemic of the attention that its seriousness commends.
While there is growing evidence that the lockdown measures have resulted in high levels of socio-economic stress, especially within the country’s sizeable poor population that depends on a daily wage and which cannot afford the lockdown, the government has paid only lip service to the provision of social protection and has downplayed the extent of the desperation resulting from its control measures.
Further, the decision by the political authorities to carry out mass evictions in Nairobi and Mombasa, which are also two of the counties that people cannot leave or enter, seem extremely callous especially under the circumstances.
Further, Kenya’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been highly militarized with the police, rather than the political or medical authorities, emerging as the face of that response. While enforcing these measures, police have killed not less than 21 people around the country and cases of violence, the invasion of homes, and ill-considered arrests and extortions continue to be reported.
The Covid-19 crisis has also raised stark questions about the role of great powers on Kenyan soil. The role of China in Kenya’s future affairs is important as data from the national treasury shows that Chinese debt stood at US 5.4 billion or 73.4 percent of total bilateral debt at the end of September 2019. In this context, Kenya’s growing dependency on Chinese debt is discomforting. Kenya’s dealings with China are government-to-government, lack transparency and have reduced Kenyan citizens to passive recipients of ready made decisions. We commend the Court of Appeal judgment nullifying the repayment of Chinese debt in relation to the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).
If this debt ever becomes payable, it should be paid out of the private resources of the Kenyatta and Ruto families.
In conclusion, while any genuine response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been little, Kenyatta has used the cover of the crisis to extend his powers and to complete what increasingly looks like a scheme of continuing in power after his term ends in 2022.
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