What happened at State House

The question remains; what transpired, leading to the reinstatement of the four Presidential Strategic Communication Unit’s directors who had been hounded out of State House, on the return of President Uhuru Kenyatta from Botswana last week.

What is clear is that something of seismic proportions happened and it could, as we are told, have everything to do with political interventions on behalf of the four who had been barred from accessing State House by the red-beret sentry guards acting on ‘orders from above’.

We can, on the basis of revelations by one of them, link the action to political pressure by the well-connected Jubilee mandarins who the affected reached out to and who reportedly sold to the President the ‘fear’ that for two of them, one would, as one American President once cautioned, rather have them inside the tent peeing outside than have them outside peeing inside.

The two, Dennis Itumbi and Eric Ng’eno, are the most ‘lethal’ in dangling the flaming sword of the written word especially against those whom their cacophonous message is directed at. Just sample the acerbic and acrid language they have deployed against those who they perceive to be standing in the way of Jubilee leaders’ plan to rule Kenya beyond 2022. Of course, nobody can begrudge them the dream of a relay race till and even beyond 2032 when they expect William Ruto to finish his last term and hand over the baton to another jubilant insider.

There must be a clarification here based on independent inquiry and verification by journalists and the three directors’ own admission about the sudden turn of events against them. Indeed action was taken against them and as the State House deputy Chief of Staff Nzioka Waita communicated at the time, details would have been provided to them on the ‘way forward’, once the President returned. I can assure you this smart and suave former Safaricom Corporate Affairs Director who was poached in March 2016 from the country’s most profitable and sophisticated company would have been kicked out of office had he been acting at his own and not the President’s wishes when he pulled the carpet under the feet of the three –Munyori Buku (Head of Public Communications), James Kinyua (Head of Branding and Events) as well as Mr Itumbi (Digital and Diaspora Communications Manager) and Mr Ng’eno (Chief of Messaging and Speech Writing).

Three things happened after Mr Kenyatta’s return. Apart from the question of which direction they would rather the four peed from, the Jubilee political cabal must have brought to the President’s attention two other facts:

First, that if they are fired and their livelihood threatened, the four could turn into blogger mercenaries for Jubilee’s local and foreign (real and imagined) enemies;

two, shoving them into low-profile posts like at the Jubilee party headquarters, would be a disincentive to the ferocious young and blood-seeking master-destroyers; that they may not be as helpful to the party (in maligning opponents) as they always have, often just falling short of picking the Presidential Seal from his table when he is away; thirdly, fear that they have in the course of duty shared so much with the President and it would make him (Mr Kenyatta) look selfish and callous to have them removed from State House in such abrupt and public manner.

That is why the President posed for pictures with them when he came back but that was just one of the PR gimmicks that these chaps have been used to staging, but now applied in reverse and in favour of the President’s image. The other thing that happened was that there was a tongue-lashing moment, the moment of truth, where respect for the chain of command starting from the President down to Mr Waita and then their immediate boss Manoah Esipisu would have to be respected, even though the two possess no known history of campaigning for Jubilee in 2012-2013.

That indeed is the way of life given that if the President felt two of them were that good, they would have been given the two posts before Mr Esipisu and Mr Waita chanced on the scene. In any case, one of the most noisy and overzealous Cabinet secretaries in the President’s office, Joseph Nkaissery, was until the other day a dyed-in-the-wool Raila Odinga’s political scrum player, tall and with the strong neck and body muscles needed on this rugby match position.

The impact was that away from the camaraderie of cameras the four have gone silent and, except Mr Itumbi who surfaced at the media section at State House when Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu came visiting, probably because of his cryptic ‘Digital and Diaspora Communications’ job description, the others have gone quiet. In fact, Mr Itumbi confessed he was breaking his own self-imposed exile from the blogosphere, with the exception of his daily ‘sermons’.

Even then, henceforth we are told, their statements will have to be vetted and cleared by a higher authority and that at an opportune time albeit stealthily and in sequence, they will be eased out slowly.

Well, as we said last week, even this can be tricky for a President keen to distinguish between a professional working relationship and the hi-five unwinding sessions with buddies of all ages and life-choice orientations.