By MURITHI MUTIGA
Posted Saturday, April 27 2013 at 18:52
IN SUMMARY
- Matiba managed to keep all hospital administrators on their toes simply by sending out the message that the man at the top cared and that everyone needed to take his cue and handle their jobs with seriousness.
Older medical professionals will tell you that they can think of no more effective Health minister than Kenneth Stanley Njindo Matiba.
He held the docket for a brief period in the 1980s and was famed for his surprise visits to the field.
A friend told me about the day he showed up unannounced at a hospital in Meru.
When he arrived, he demanded to be taken to the store where equipment that was no longer functional was kept.
Matiba berated the management for abandoning trolleys which had, say, only one wheel missing there.
He was championing expansion of hospital equipment maintenance facilities, which he argued could save the millions of shillings spent on buying new gear and free up resources to buy medicine.
Next, he said he needed to use the toilet facilities.
He was ushered to the staff lavatory. He instead demanded to use the section reserved for patients.
Fortunately for the management, the condition of the facilities was not bad on that day.
Matiba managed to keep all hospital administrators on their toes simply by sending out the message that the man at the top cared and that everyone needed to take his cue and handle their jobs with seriousness.
What distinguished him was his ambition. He had the fire in the belly associated with over-achievers.
He wanted to leave a mark everywhere he went. He was an African trailblazer in the horticulture and tourism industry, although he didn’t quite succeed when he tried to set up an airline.
Many Kenyans of an older vintage know him for his effectiveness as a Cabinet minister and PS in the many dockets he held.
But the stories you hear about his time as chief of Kenya Breweries Ltd, where he oversaw rapid expansion and introduced many Kenyan farmers to barley growing, sum up the man.
He didn’t just focus on the bottom-line. He turned KBL into a sporting powerhouse. A sports journalist tells me that a short time into his tenure, KBL had the best football, boxing and rugby clubs in the country.
Kenya’s first Olympic gold medalist, Robert Wangila, was on the books at KBL.
Matiba eventually paid a high price for his agitation for the expansion of the political space.
But if only a quarter of the new Cabinet Secretaries have the same thrusting ambition and restless impatience with the status quo that Matiba had, wananchi would be very well off under their leadership.
There are those who say that the public should ignore the ethnic origin of the Cabinet nominees and focus on their credentials.
That would make sense if we were in a homogeneous country like Sweden or Japan.
In a nation where tribe is still king as witnessed in the voting patterns in the just-concluded elections, people will always check to see what message the heads of government are sending with their appointments.
Retired President Mwai Kibaki’s first term in office was in many ways a great success.
But Mr Kibaki faced a very tough re-election campaign in 2007 for one reason only.
The rest of the country felt that his administration was disproportionately skewed towards the Mt Kenya communities.
In the first lot of Permanent Secretaries picked in 2003, 11 of 25 were either Kikuyu or Meru.
It was the opening bell for perennial wrangles culminating in the 2007 election debacle.
Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto have clearly made the calculation that they should hold on to the 50 per cent of voters who endorsed them.
That is their choice. But they didn’t have to mislead wananchi in all their pronouncements before the announcement that their nominees would reflect the “face of Kenya.”
That was clearly a deception.
Murithi Mutiga is the Special Projects Editor, Sunday Nation mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.co
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