President Uhuru Kenyatta puts his bet for 2017 on Team B. Will he succeed?

The Jubilee swansong is no longer playing. The drums stopped beating and the dance floor is emptying, fast.

“If there is one thing that is giving the President sleepless nights, it is insecurity,” Manoah Esipisu President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Spokesman once told a reporter.

After two-and-half years in office, it seems a lot more is keeping him awake than insecurity.

What if elections were held today? Would Mr Kenyatta win?

In other words, what would compel Kenyans to give the Jubilee pair another chance? Will a reshuffled Cabinet achieve what those before it did not?

A simple question: Is Uhuru Kenyatta’s Kenya better than Mwai Kibaki’s?

The ability to foretell what will happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, said Winston Churchil, and to have the ability to afterwards explain why it didn’t happen is what sets apart a great politician.

The President needed to explain why he needed “to give the Kenyan public a demonstrable example” of his “unwavering commitment to delivering on the promises” of his administration.

But then, he must be hard-pressed, for example, to explain away how it took him so long to reshuffle his Cabinet when all indications were that Government operations had been hobbled by the absence of substantive Cabinet secretaries; or why crippling inefficiency of public service that lubricates the appalling corruption and a nauseating business as usual attitude is ever present; or whether the tyranny of numbers in the Legislature has been of any use to the country other than to be used to steamroller partisan political agenda.

And so what informed the Cabinet reshuffle?

With sagging support as shown in recent opinion polls, the President had to reach out for something that would make the country believe in him again.

Having won the 2013 election with the thinnest of margins, it was all looking like an accident waiting to happen as the Government walked from one crisis to another.

There are those who will see the changes as piecemeal, a game of musical chairs perhaps. But one almost feels the nervousness and the impatience of the UhuRuto team to turn things around.

It is too early to judge the duo, but all indications are that President Kenyatta is fairing worse than President Mwai Kibaki at this point in his term.

The incessant coalition squabbles aside, Kibaki turned around the economy in the first 12 months. Two years later, President Kenyatta seems to be looking for the silver bullet that will get things working for the country.

Political capital

The economy expanded by 2.5 per cent in Kibaki’s first year in 2003. In 2013, the economy grew by a mere 0.6 per cent. This year, International Monetary Fund revised its forecast for Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product growth for 2015 from 6.9 per cent to 6.5 per cent and trimmed 2016 numbers from 7.2 per cent to 6.8 per cent.

The political capital he gained after appointing a lean, technocrat-filled Cabinet has largely been wasted. The cost of living has continued to rise with the vulnerable suffering the most. So many other challenges stand in the way to the realisation of a fully transformed Kenya.

The Government is still plagued by mind boggling corruption, crashing red tape and irritating inefficiencies. And the people feel no less better than they were two years.

The promise of a government working for the people is still far off. Those who felt insecure from the spate of terror attacks earlier in the year must have felt that the Government was not working for them.

Elsewhere, there is little to show for the bold reforms promised at the campaign and the spine to tackle age-old political mischief that has held back the promise of Kenya for far too long.

The promise to start projects that can give the hordes of jobless youth a source of livelihood remains just that... a promise.  The effect of the Huduma Centres across the country is to say the least, a drop in an ocean of lethargy and log-rolling. While returns from the Sh300 billion standard gauge railway and the Sh2.4 trillion Lapsset projects will accrue in the long term.

So, could that explain the disenchantment with UhuRuto this early? That and a few things that have worked against Jubilee.

Indisputably, nearly half of the voters voted for the President’s main opponent Raila Odinga in the last polls. It will take so much to win them over and play along in the Kenya President Kenyatta envisions. Look at the Cabinet list and you will get what I mean.

Secondly, the cases at the International Criminal Court that seemingly anchored their campaign has become the albatross around their necks. When hordes of MPs are shipped to The Hague for a week’s conference because of their case, one must wonder how the country moves. Yet it is the third reason that is backfiring and making the grand plans seem like all talk and no action.

The expectation was that the President would break clean from the past and chart a different path for the country. Initially to his credit, he shunned the politics of yester-year and left no doubt that the Executive was no place for politics of carrot and stick, cheap politicking and the mindless rhetoric.

But over time, the dark, long shadow of political expediency and politics of carrot and stick has loomed large. And you will see it in the Cabinet lineup.

Tellingly, those axed yesterday comprised more of politicians than the expatriates. There are also two long-serving politicians on the list. Not a big deal. Let us wait and see what the President’s Team B will offer.