Waiguru is in a hole and the tide is high

NAIROBI: I am among many who are not convinced Devolution Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru should remain in office because she and her friends claim she is innocent of claims of corruption and flagrant wastage of funds in her portfolio.

I am happy to be counted among those who insist the most persuasive reason why she should step aside is because she believes she is innocent.

What better way to get a clean bill of health than to stand up to scrutiny?

Yes, the longer she remains in office the more she polarises the country, and the higher layers of scum she smears on the Jubilee planet as it orbits around Kenya’s power circuit.

Worse still, as experience teaches us and which Jubilee diehards who probably put President Uhuru’s interests ahead of her own as a woman to whom life has been more than generous, the longer she spits on the faces of Kenyans asking about the millions lost in her ministry, the more she gives momentum to the question that refuses to go.

That question is; why aren’t the rules that were quickly deployed against her five suspended Cabinet colleagues not relevant for her; who or what is insulating her against the demands to step aside?

How does she expect Kenyans to swallow the story of her innocence when she remains not only the ‘whistle-blower’ in her own docket, but also the one helping the ‘investigators’ write reports and probe the loss of millions?

For ordinary Kenyans, it is an extraordinary feat for millions to be lost in your ministry then you survive or are protected by the machinery of State and even ‘tyranny of numbers’, just because you say you are neither an accounting nor procurement officer! Get me right, this is not to say she is necessarily corrupt. It is just that she holds the ultimate responsibility for what happened in her docket for that is what the President asked of her, and what in effect she was sworn in for.

But maybe the President has his own reasons to ignore the contradiction in the way he handled the rest who were forced to step aside for the mere mention in his ‘List of Shame’, and the case of Ms. Anne Waiguru.

This is because you would expect that he would be happy to shield his administration from the rising perception it is steeped in graft, its engines are oiled by corruption money, and that most of the people surrounding him are either vendorpreneurs (hawking anything they can sell to government at 10 to a hundred times the cost) or tenderpreneurs (brokers looking for Government tenders to sell to the highest bidder!)

The only way he would do this is by acceding to the uncompromising reprimand he made that he had drawn the line on corruption. As things are, it seems only rats have crossed this line and have been  swallowed by the booby trap and all the rest of the brood in power are angels.

Or we are probably right, the President must be serious when he says magazeti ni ya kufunga nyama (newspapers are for wrapping meat) and so he believes that is how his promise has been vaporised by time and vagaries of amnesia.

I have learned from experience three things that you look out for to know the position of the President on  matters that madden the country, but by which he seems not bothered.

One, the President will laugh the issue off, saying it is noise by those who are power-hungry and have nothing else to do but to criticise.

Secondly, you will see the hand of State House through a cunningly buttered statement from a junior official known to dine and wine with the President,

in this case you know who, coming out with ‘facts’ and ‘reasons’ why son-and-so is being lynched when ‘the facts speak for themselves’. I can bet the last coin no official can issue such a statement if it were not cleared by the President.

Finally, you need to watch the President’s known buddies, some of who can even share a stick from his cigarettes’ packet, and what they say or fail to say. There you will be sure that there is nothing like ‘expressing my own opinion’.

Waiguru’s defenders are now focusing more on the diversionary issue of sex toys and speculation about her romantic life. This is ok, we should respect her privacy and choices in life; but certainly not at the expense of how and who stole or squandered the millions in National Youth Service, Youth Fund and her luxurious office!

Not when patients are dying unsupported because our biggest national teaching and referral hospital has only 24 ICU beds!

If I were Waiguru’s adviser, I would ask her to bite the bullet and step aside voluntarily because she says she has nothing to hide; if she truly cares for the President and the image of his government.

It does not matter what the President and her friends think because as the tide builds up, experience shows, she might soon be on her own.

To be sure of this, listen to the murmurs in Jubilee about how Anne Waiguru ‘is now our biggest burden!”