With the Cabinet appointments all but concluded this week, attention shifts to the National Assembly. Members of the House were right to demand earlier this week that President Uhuru Kenyatta must name at least the minimum number of Cabinet Secretary nominees allowed by the Constitution before they could embark on the vetting process.
To President Uhuru’s credit and that of Deputy President William Ruto, the gravity of the matter was evidently appreciated and the list of four Cabinet Secretaries nominated on Tuesday soon swelled to 16 on Thursday — just two short of the 18 promised by the new Government.
The sky-high expectations occasioned by the naming of largely professional team to steer the ambitious Jubilee manifesto dictate that the National Assembly must move quickly to give the country a Cabinet worthy of that name. Kenyans will be watching the vetting process to determine whether it’s a professional effort geared to achieve the goals for which it was conceived: To reward merit, root out the morally and ethically questionable, to engender fairness and to foster gender and regional equity.
Members of the Committee on Appointments know better than to turn the noble exercise into a lynch mob or, worse still, convert the process into a meaningless attempt at rubberstamping and praise-singing. No doubt, the public will be watching to see whether their submissions will count for anything and whether committee members are driven by narrow partisan interests. Time is of the essence. The Standing Orders state that upon receipt of a notification of nomination for appointment of a Cabinet Secretary, such nomination shall stand committed to the Committee on Appointments of the House for consideration.
Before holding an approval hearing, the Standing Orders further state, the Committee shall notify the candidate and the public of the time and place for the holding of the approval hearing at least seven days prior to the hearing.
Thereafter, the Committee is expected to conduct hearings on the proposed appointments and shall, unless otherwise provided in law, table its report in the House within 14 days of the date the notification was received. And that is not all. The timelines specified within the Standing Orders clearly point to another crisis that Parliament must resolve — the country will not have a duly appointed Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury on or before April 30th when the Budget Estimates must reach the House.
Article 221(1) of the Constitution states that at least two months before the end of each financial year, the Cabinet Secretary responsible for Finance shall submit to the National Assembly Estimates of the revenue and expenditure of the National government for the next financial year to be tabled in the National Assembly.
The law is explicit on the Cabinet Secretary’s role and given the facts, Parliament will be called upon to find creative ways of avoiding serious legal and financial implications for the country. Such a precedent was set in 2011 when the then Finance Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, submitted the financial Estimates to the House after the constitutional deadline but the Speaker shielded him from sanctions by acknowledging the transitional phase.
The argument then was the new Constitution was not fully operational whereupon the Executive contended that the Finance Minister could not strictly be referred to as a Cabinet Secretary. This because he was also a Member of Parliament while Cabinet Secretaries are not members of the House. His successor, Mr Njeru Githae, fully aware the persuasive argument of the previous year could not wash, fulfilled the requirement last year.
Once again, transition to the new constitutional order has returned to challenge the acumen of our lawmakers. One hopes that a compromise will be struck taking into account the best interests of the country. All eyes will be on the National Assembly as it goes about resolving the sticky transitional issues and fulfilling its important mandate of ensuring occupants of Executive positions are people of merit and reflect the face of Kenya.
