Dear Mr. President,
We’re closing in on your first 100 days in office, and it’s time for Kenyans to give you a report card based you your many campaign promises to hustlers.
We’ll focus on one promise — fighting corruption.
Promises made during the campaigns form part of the highest office the moment it gets its occupant. Among the many promises made, I’ve clung to the fight against corrupt cartels because it holds the key to many development opportunities our country could reap by eradicating corruption.
You promised the nation that the moment you put the Bible down after taking your oath of office, you would go for the corruption cartels’ jugular.
But Kenyans have watched as corrupt individuals are left off the hook and given a warm welcome in your administration.
But first, let’s take a trip down memory lane.
I hope the mere mentioning of the queen of beauty who took the capital city’s streets by storm, cat-walking to the utter dismay and admiration of the male gender, would be evocative by now.
She did this with propped-up swag alongside spruced-up English astonishing the world as she spewed the queen’s dialect (kizungu mingi) that mama mboga and boda-boda guys couldn’t tag along.
They were left aloof in the unfolding saga of accusations and counter-accusations. If you haven’t caught my drift, the lady in question couldn’t explain why millions of National Youth Service (NYS) funds were stashed in gunias. And ferried away to perfect a few individuals’ projects rather than the corporate development of the parastatal for which they were intended.
You wanted her to furnish the public with the truth about that.
@WilliamsRuto "Tomorrow, every citizen who will come to Nyayo Stadium, you will go back with a course paid for by the University of Arizona. You'd otherwise pay $1000, which is like 100,000 kshs, but you will go home tomorrow with a 16-unit course. #Hotseatnews @MauriceNdole pic.twitter.com/8tsFLb8tm5
— Hot Seat News (@TheHotSeatNews) December 11, 2022
But we are yet to know the truth.
I hoped this would be a task not too herculean, considering that you were second in command for ten years and, by logical reasoning, you were privy to vital intel regarding the cartels.
I beamed with expectations knowing too well that the cartels were familiar faces that lay in a bed of roses (acquired scandalously with taxpayers’ money) with the powers that be, and you, Mr. President, would smoke them out.
Luckily you came to power, nay, sorry, God gave you the instruments of power. As you put the Bible down that day and raised the sword of power, the frenzied crowd roared into ululation, cheering your achievement.
I ululated in unison, not because I cherished your win, but because I was jettisoned into the happy realm by grandeur thought of the dire fate awaiting the cartels, the source of our national pain.
I knew their goose was cooked; well convinced that in the wake of the sword coming down, it would land on the jugulars of the several cartels known to you.
The joke was on us.
Several once-active major corruption cases involving your cronies at hustler nation have inexplicably come tumbling down.
And you haven’t said a word assuring Kenyans you’re still committed to the fight against corruption.
Kenyans are puzzled. They cannot reconcile the man hoping from church to church in the name of thanksgiving tours and the man doing nothing about corruption.
Nabii
In frustration, you may have realized they have christened you “Nabii,” a not-so-subtle dig at your pious public posture and your love for quoting the Bible verses while your administration does not seem to live up to the piousness.
Allow me to address you as Nabii from now on.
I implore you to embrace the name Nabii and wear it like a badge of honor because it will help greatly in girding your conscience whenever and wherever your fleshy instinct strives to detach you from your good spiritual reservoir of morals.
I’m commenting on this because some of us delude ourselves into thinking that we know more than we do, or worse, that we possess some unique insight about another person’s life or future.
However, the good book tells me that only the immortal Supreme Being – God – knows everything. And at the appointed opportune moment, he will reveal every bit of the mortals’ (you and me) life to the astonishment and embarrassment of one another.
It is not something special, but it is of fundamental principle for the highest office in the land to steer the nation along every word that constitutes the sentences that emanate from the office.
Nabii, it pains to see millions of Kenyans languishing in poverty as drought takes the last of their breath while few individuals are siphoning billions of money that could otherwise be used to mitigate their well-being.
It is only reasonable to trust God while praying away the vices and calamities when the right of every Kenyan to a decent living was upheld by the people in leadership.
Trusting in the Lord isn’t escapism but an opportunity to exemplify morality to Christendom and non-christian communities without any veil of pretense. By important extension, nothing is more vital than that we, humanity, be clear about the ramification of our actions to others physically, economically, or both.
This calls for cognizance of our actions because such actions will, no doubt, impact others, whether direct or indirect.
Scripture is replete with incredible insights, especially on the issue of wisdom and foolishness. Despite many distinctions between a wise and a foolish person, humility is the most outstanding.
It also behooves me to remind you that just like the mark of a leader doesn’t repose on his eloquence and shrewd articulation of issues but on the way he treats the lowly of the society.
Additionally, the quality of a leader is not measured by the size of his tumbo but by the seriousness in implementing campaign promises to help the country.
Major corruption cases have ripped off Kenya a mind-boggling sum of money. As fresh as our minds can elucidate – starting from former President Daniel Arap Moi’s – Goldenberg scandal, President Mwai Kibaki’s Anglo-leasing alongside Chicken gate. And several of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s regimes, such as KEMSA, Euro-bond, Arror, and Kimwarer scandals all still etched in the annals of history and will define the course of financial infidelity in Kenya.
Records show you, Nabii, have served in one capacity or another in all the regimes mentioned, and by such, you must be privy to the named scandals.
It’s plausible to conclude you have a wealth of experience with the many faces and the mutations that corruption assumes to stay alive in Kenya. And you may have an idea of how to absolutely halt any corruption deal that might want to rear its ugly head in your regime.
Little hope
But judging from the first 100 days where your cronies with corruption cases have received get-out-of-jail-free cards, there’s little hope.
The lords of antidevelopment are waiting on the sidelines to start reaping big of your regime’s scandals if you allow it.
Going by your high affinity for biblical ‘values,’ I suggest you revisit Daniel 6.
Even though I’m convinced that you, being a paragon of biblical mastery, have already known it both of head and has pinned it in your heart, it is of essence that I gave you the small synopsis.
Daniel, having been catapulted to the apex of administration in a foreign land due to his pious way of living coupled with his typical administration ability, the antidevelopment lords conspired against him. Still, they could not find an iota of scandal on him, leave alone even harming a fly.”
At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they could not find any – Daniel 6 vs. 4″.
At least, you should have heard from the clergy buddies. But many of them, if not all, have chosen to play sycophantic gimmicks instead of to the truth that is divine.
I don’t want to run the risk of being sacrilegious, but the truth is that many of them have become easy-to-manipulate tumbocrats than championing against societal moral decadences of which corruption is one or, succinctly put, disseminating gospel truth.
Avoid them like Levite priests of the old world to leprous minions that could desecrate by association or contact.
The clergy who love the truth should have told you by now that the public has a vested interest in cases like the NYS scandal and would have wished to know the truth.
Nabii sir, there’s a lesson for us from the kids’ story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” were I the President, I’d have chosen the truth when I’m naked in public than surrounding myself with sycophants who cheer and compliment me on how beautiful my birth suit fits well, when I’m in, fact, naked.