Will Waiguru be saved by the powers that be, again?

Anne Waiguru, the governor of Kirinyaga and survivor of Kenyan political space, was yesterday left clutching at the  familiar straws that have always saved her public life from drowning.

She has had an amazing rise since she was appointed the first Devolution and Planning Cabinet Secretary in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s first Cabinet in 2013.

Her fledgling career in public service has in the past been rescued by higher forces in government and in the current turn of events, she finds herself in the same camp with Opposition leader Raila Odinga courtesy of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).

But will the higher forces step in to save her career once more? One recent event points to possibly hard times for her.

In the last few months, Waiguru has locked horns with the powerful Internal Security PS Karanja Kibicho and other local politicians over the construction of the Sh15 billion Kemri hospital in Mwea.

Higher forces

Her government had declined to hand over to Kemri the title deed for the 40.29 hectare (100 acre) parcel as she sought to renegotiate an MoU entered by the previous county government.

The controversy ended when the national government acquired the land, cancelled the title held by the Kirinyaga County Government and issued a new one to Kemri.

It was one of the rare moments when higher forces in government had failed to work in her favour. Yesterday could one such moment seeing that 27 out of 33 MCAs participated in the ouster motion. The inference was clear - there had not been any calls from higher forces trying to intercede for the governor as witnessed previously in Nairobi.

Could Waiguru’s luck be running out? Time will tell, but if it turns out that way, it will be an interesting twist to a dramatic career since her days in the Cabinet between 2013 and 2015.

Heading one of the most loaded ministries at the time, she soon cut an image of a determined performer to some and a divisive insider to others.

She was not only managing the allocation of gigantic resources to the 47 counties but also of the highly capitalised National Youth Service (NYS), the National Government Constituency Development Fund (NG-CDF), Uwezo and Women Enterprise funds and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).

Depending on the lenses through which one looks at her political journey, it would produce as many passionate friends as it would bitter foes.

When, for instance, she held her rained-off homecoming party at Kiamugumo Primary School in Gichugu in September 2014, she made an impassioned plea over the bad state of the Kianyaga-Kiamugumo road, prompting the president to immediately promise to tarmac the stretch.

Political journey

As Devolution CS, she was squarely in the women’s corner and is credited with being the brainchild behind the National Government Affirmative Action Fund (Ngaaf). She was earlier also credited with being the brainchild behind the Integrated Financial Management and Information System (Ifmis) portal that later became a source of much controversy about missing, misdirected, miscalculated and inflated government invoices and payments.

One of her non-controversial projects is the Huduma Centres which are a permanent footprint of efficient government services in the grassroots.

But controversy has marked most of her political journey.

In 2015, then Igembe South MP Mithika Linturi started collecting signatures to impeach her following allegations of loss of public funds at the NYS. Linturi’s proposed motion seemed to have been going on very well with bipartisan parliamentary support even after President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto supported the embattled CS.

Many of the critics of the CS then pointed at the preferential treatment that she was getting from government which had earlier that year, on the same grounds, forced out other ministers such as Health’s Charity Ngilu, Infrastructure and Transport’s Michael Kamau, Energy’s Davis Chirchir,  Agriculture’s Felix Koskei and Labour’s Kazungu Kambi.

How Linturi sabotaged his own motion by failing to turn up to move it became the big news on the day of her expected ouster. Linturi confessed that the Jubilee principals had asked him to drop the motion.

Finally, Waiguru opted to step aside on health grounds on November 21, 2015 ending one of the most divisive disagreements in the two-year-old Jubilee government.

“I have been advised by my doctor to take time off to recover and to undertake much lighter duties for some time,” she said in her resignation statement. 

In 2017 she won the Jubilee Party primaries and later the Kirinyaga gubernatorial race against Joseph Ndathi and the more politically experienced Martha Karua, the former Justice Minister in Mwai Kibaki’s government.

Waiguru’s current clash with MCAs in Kirinyaga has been notable for its twists and turns. Jubilee Party (JP) at some point even delved into the controversy, sacking the Assembly leadership and bringing in her allies.

It was an action that prompted a protest from all the Kirinyaga MPs, who in a press conference, urged the party to let the MCAs independently exercise their mandate. It also failed to stop the impeachment.

The new battleground might as well be that the impeachment happened when the High Court had already barred the MCAs from proceeding with the motion on the grounds that the Covid-19 restrictions were likely to bar the governor from offering a full defence to the issues raised against her.

Ms Waiguru said as much in her one page statement yesterday. It is probably a pointer to how the row is going be protracted in the coming days.