Uhuru’s was a refreshing break from tradition

By PHILIP OCHIENG'

Posted  Saturday, April 27   2013 at  18:55

IN SUMMARY

• To latch onto each name, he has to mount a very elaborate search and consultation (in an extraordinarily large coast-to-coast nation). Therefore – unlike in Kenya heretofore – he has to announce his Cabinet nominees agonisingly slowly over many weeks.

Tradition can significantly stand in the way whenever you try to do things differently.

In Kenya, the tradition has been to announce the Cabinet immediately after the elections and all at once. But what is sacrosanct about tradition?

What profit can society bag from the nip and tuck with which a new President is expected to announce his Executive team, especially when the electoral success is vitally owed to another party? Clearly, such a hurry can quench only primal thirst – the excruciating itch by the populace to hear who is who in the next administration.

Nothing is ever more exciting than their names appearing – with mugshots – on page one of the next morning’s Press. But it is a hell-for-leather speed sustainable only in winner-take-all situations and only where the winning party is alone. First, there are hundreds of candidates for each “nominative” situation.

Secondly, each member-party of a confederacy like UhuRuto’s sets out to fight for its own candidate. Thus negotiating each position is necessarily sensitive, delicate and protracted. Not infrequently, the only possibility is to announce each case singly as soon you agree on it.

That seems to be what Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto have done.

The done thing

But it has precedents. In the United States, it is the done thing. There, to be sure, the new President has no electoral party ally whose demands can check the president’s nomination speed. However – though the system licenses him to take all – it also deems it socially beneficial for him to announce his Cabinet only piecemeal.

To latch onto each name, he has to mount a very elaborate search and consultation (in an extraordinarily large coast-to-coast nation). Therefore – unlike in Kenya heretofore – he has to announce his Cabinet nominees agonisingly slowly over many weeks.

I reiterate that such a manner of Cabinet formation gives the newly elected president all the time and space he needs to consult as widely as possible over each name. At least two considerations may be at work. The social one is that the individuals made available to him must be suitable for their prospective positions.

There is a personal consideration as well. The newly elected president needs to reward at least two constituencies: (a) those who played vital roles in his elevation to State House and (b) the leaders of those parties which contributed essentially to the electoral success.

But, in a gentile situation – such as still obtains in all former European colonies – there is a third consideration. Job offers are one way in which the President can dull the sharp edges of such potentially convulsive factors as our perennial tribal conflicts.

Thus if “UhuRuto” has taken up to a month since the election to announce the nominees, I see nothing out of the way, especially for a state trying that method for the first time since the new Constitution made ours a genuinely presidential system – the Constitution we ousted in 2010 having been an unhappy marriage between “presidentialism” and Westminster’s “parliamentarism”.

Very long period

Secondly, by presenting to Congress each name as it comes – namely, piecemeal – the new US president makes it possible to stagger over a very long period the whole legislative process of vetting nominees. In content, therefore, President Kenyatta’s apparent delay in putting a Cabinet in place seems only natural.

Wasn’t it a change, too, to see young Kenyatta take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves to personally give the nation a pen-portrait of each nominee, allowing them to briefly introduce their programmes – all in the glare of media cameras?

Wasn’t it a far cry from Nyayo’s demeaning roadside announcements of names of people he had never even consulted? Wasn’t it a big sign that Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta was serious when he vowed the other day to lift Kenya to a new level of doing political business?

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