It's slippery path for the ruling Jubilee party

N! Xau aka Gcao Tekene Com. Sounds crazy, but it was crazier watching the man who bore that name in action. A mischievous grin on his wrinkled face, mostly naked except for a loin cloth that barely covered his buttocks, the man who starred in the 'Gods must be crazy' movie was incredible.

A hitherto cohesive community living in the wild is thrown into pandemonium after a bottle is dropped in their midst from a plane. At first, it excited them, only to threaten the community's unity later. Severally, N! Xau seeks to return the strange object (bottle) causing disharmony back to the gods, to no avail. Nothing worked the way N! Xau wanted, and that leads me to Jubilee. The bottle (nominations) dropped from the plane (constitution) is giving Jubilee nightmares.

The gods, seemingly, have gone berserk on Jubilee. On March 17, 2017, President Uhuru Kenyatta was in Mombasa re-launching the Mtongwe Ferry Services, an occasion that hit headlines more for the mistreatment Mombasa Governor Ali Hassan Joho got than the novelty of the occasion. Two weeks later, a pontoon (platform serving as a foot bridge) at the Mtongwe channel broke off.

Two weeks after President Uhuru Kenyatta launched the Sh1.2 billion Sigiri Bridge in Budalangi, it disintegrated. The Khaunga bridge in Mumias East Constituency, looking superior to the Sigiri even to the eye of non-engineers, cost Sh120 million and is longer than Sigiri by about 25 metres. Maybe the gods are speaking to us; expressing displeasure and telling Kenyans Jubilee is not the bridge they need to cross the chasm of poverty, nepotism, tribalism; skewed distribution of the national cake, joblessness, social inequalities, insecurity and desperation causing despondency among Kenyans.

Ill fated

This collapse came within days of word breaking that several doctors attending a conference at Weston Hotel, a three star hotel linked to Deputy President William Ruto had gone down with cholera. A three-star hotel and a cholera mix qualify for the crazy. More confounding was why Health Cabinet Secretary Cleopa Mailu sought to put a lid on the incident through perjury, claiming it was a case of food poisoning.

As a demonstration of executive impunity, Weston Hotel was not quarantined, not even for five minutes, when any lesser proprietor would perhaps have cooled his heels in some police station for failing to observe Public Health Laws, and his joint closed to boot. Meanwhile, campaigns for the August 8, duel continue.

The expression Johnny-come-lately easily rolls up every time the Uhuruto duo make pledges while on their campaign trails. They are promising heaven, yet they have largely failed to deliver the mundane. But, as adage has it; you can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool everyone all the time. Jubilees recent launch of a manifesto adds another rung to its ladder of deceit.

Jubilee is campaigning on a plank of impractical, colourful promises, notwithstanding it has not delivered on the previous ones. Youth still crave ICT hubs. Five stadiums in five counties is more imagination than anything practicable despite Ruto averring a few in some obscure places (bringing the total to nine) will be done within months. Better pay for doctors and nurses? Tell me something else. Nothing better for women, and the marginalised are getting even more marginalised when the able and affluent masquerade as disabled to steal from the disabled. Interestingly, the top leadership sees nothing wrong. Job creation? Still waiting as companies fold, others relocate and redundancies rule the days.

The undelivered

An incumbent government anchoring itself on the plank of promises rather than tangible achievements, having had five solid years to make an impact, disenchants. A video that did rounds on social media depicting someone boiling nuts from the SGR for his children's supper, hilarious as it was, had a potent message: No politics supersedes the politics of the stomach. An empty stomach robs all other human functions their faculties.

At the Jubilee manifesto launch, I would have entertained a moment of doubt had President Kenyatta not sworn that under his watch, the government had not imported any maize. That was audacious amid the maize shortage crippling the country. Has he forgotten so soon the maize imports his government procured from Mexico, Ukraine, South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda in recent times and years? Wasn't it his Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture who told the country there was a shortage of 7 million bags of maize in early 2015? How was that deficit overcome? A simple Google check debunks what Joe Mucheru, Cabinet Secretary for ICT said about the country's advancement in the technological realm. When one is caught in so many untruths in a single sitting, dishonesty becomes the operative word.

Having declined to approve the HELB bill that sought to reduce penalties on loans for jobless graduates in 2015, Kenyatta now promises to double the loans. That will enslave university graduates even more.

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The [email protected]