Political fire consumes Lands Cabinet Secretary

By ALPHONCE SHIUNDU and GEOFFREY MOSOKU

The political woes facing Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu are a confluence of the fight against impunity in government, politics of the Jubilee coalition, the 2017 elections and powerful interests of landowners out to protect their turf.

In multiple interviews with insiders in Jubilee and those in the Opposition, both on-the-record and off-the-record, consensus is that Ngilu’s censure was meant to “tell her to follow the law”, and “show her who is boss” in managing the political hot-potato that land is in Kenya.

There are also those who view the issue as a matter of protocol, in which they say Ngilu did the job of Principal Secretary Mariam el Maawy to reorganise the ministry, perhaps without any help from the PS, and without permission from the Public Service Commission. She also ignored the National Lands Commission.

The mystery of why a joint committee of the National Assembly would recommend the censure of a Cabinet Secretary, to a House, which is led and dominated by members of the ruling Jubilee coalition, also raised eyebrows.

There are also queries of why President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto let Ngilu get consumed in the political fire without raising a finger.

Ngilu is one of the political big-shots in the Jubilee coalition – as per the pre-election coalition agreement deposited with the Registrar of Political Parties.

But the Jubilee-dominated House, with the uncompromising and fervent backing of the Majority Leader Adan Duale, backed the committee report.

“Nobody in this Government should break the law. Those who think that it is our job to protect those who break the law are living in the old days,” Duale, a URP MP, told The Standard on Sunday.

New order

“The Tenth Parliament gave us a new Constitution. The Eleventh Parliament must take the forefront to implement the Constitution. From where I sit, I will not be a rubberstamp; I will fight impunity in this country,” the Majority Leader added.

The House also approved an amendment to make Ngilu take “full responsibility” for the constitutional violations that she had been accused of when she appointed the Director General for Lands, and granted him the authority to sign title deeds.

According to Duale, Ngilu has to heed the resolution of the House, revoke the illegal appointments, and re-do the whole process according to the law.

“Ngilu is not from heaven. She must follow the law. If that’s how she operated when she served as a minister in the coalition government of (Mwai) Kibaki and Raila (Odinga), she should know that this is a new dispensation. Things have changed. The President and the Deputy will not condone people who operate outside the law,” said Duale.

Moses ole Sakuda (Kajiado West), of TNA, and also the vice chairperson of the House Committee on Lands, which censured Ngilu, said the idea was to tell the Cabinet Secretary “and all the others in government that they have to obey the law”.

“We were sending a strong message that the law has to be followed. But take it from me, she is not going anywhere,” Sakuda told The Standard on Sunday in an interview at Parliament Buildings, just a day after the censure was approved.

Sakuda was alluding to the motion reportedly being worked on behind the scenes to initiate the process of removing Ngilu from the Cabinet. He said, as far as he was concerned, the message had been sent to Ngilu. Duale and Sakuda are in agreement that the next step will be for the Committee on Implementation to follow through and make sure the resolutions of the House are implemented.

“If she doesn’t implement the resolutions of the House, any member can pick from where the committee left,” said Duale.

The first salvo against Ngilu was fired by an opposition MP John Mbadi (Suba, ODM), who sought to know why Ngilu kicked out of her docket two directors of survey. As the Lands Committee was looking into Mbadi’s query, Joseph Gitari (Kirinyaga, TNA) filed a separate query. Ngilu’s goose was cooked.

Mbadi believes that at this point, “political and business interests hijacked” the agenda and decided to show Ngilu “that she must respect the law”. “There were three groups. Those who wanted to ensure Ngilu followed the law; those who wanted her removed because she was blocking them in one way or another; and other people inside Jubilee who are eyeing Ngilu’s post and want her out to create some space,” said Mbadi.

His view is Duale can’t speak on the fidelity to the law, as a precursor to Ngilu’s censure, without having authority from some quarters to do so.

“URP and TNA were united in approving the report and in attacking Ngilu. But for me as an opposition MP, if we can unite in the House in the fight against impunity, the better!” Mbadi told The Standard on Sunday. Junet Mohammed (Suna East,ODM) added: “Jubilee  has for the last seven months been using the tyranny of numbers in the House to push through bad things. I think the unity in censuring Ngilu is that they are trying to show another face – that they can also fight impunity”.

The underlying row also has shades of the 2017 elections written all over it—there are those who view Ngilu as a politician building her base for the 2017 election campaigns through her campaign of issuing title deeds.

This group says if Ngilu “is not tamed”, then in 2017 she might use her performance in the ministry to vie for a political office. She was a presidential hopeful in the last elections, before she teamed up with Kenyatta and Ruto. Political strategist Tony Gachoka said the National Assembly had made unpopular decisions straying into the mandate of the Executive to an extent that President Kenyatta had to come out and disagree with the lawmakers. “The push to censure Ngilu was Jubilee led, it was not Cord led. She has called it a betrayal, I also call it a betrayal of the covenant of the pre-election coalition that exists between TNA, URP, Narc, which is with the registrar of political parties,” Gachoka added.

Gachoka blamed the Majority Leader of trying to use the National Assembly to “re-write the coalition agreement”.

“It is well known that Duale engineered and was behind the woes of Charity Ngilu, and the push to remove her from the Cabinet, and that matter will be viewed as it is politically,” said Gachoka. He added: “You can’t allow Duale to pronounce Executive decisions that are the preserve of the President. Cabinet Secretaries, under the Constitution, serve at the pleasure of the President”.

But then the unseen hand of wealthy landowners in the matter flashed by when the allegations of bribery came up in the National Assembly during debate. There are those who were paid to support Ngilu and those who were paid to censure her.

In the end, the House was convinced that the Cabinet Secretary had violated the law, and told her to correct the violation.

All eyes are now on Ngilu’s next course of action, with the Committee on Implementation waiting to pounce, should she ignore the House.