Getting a National ID, the universal Kenyan rite of passage, has just been tapped as a money-earner by the Kenya Kwanza government. According to a (revoked after public outcry) error-filled Gazette Notice signed by Prof. Kithure Kindiki, the Cabinet Secretary for Interior and National Administration, the State Department for Immigration and Citizenship Services intended to charge Kenyans who have turned 18, KSh 1,000 for a national identity (ID) card (now reversed downwards to KSh 300).  

Last week, Kenya’s Controller of Budget Dr Margaret Nyakang’o, revealed on national TV that her official salary has been inflated (by up to three times) in the books kept by the National Treasury. According to Dr Nyakang’o, a triple provision of her actual salary has been programmed into the IFMIS payment portal, which state of affairs makes it possible to draw the funds at will.

Wanjigi and Omtatah accept that short term Treasury Bills are authorised under the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), but argue that Treasury Bonds as presently issued violate the Constitution and s.15(2(c) of the PFMA which  states that “over the medium term, the national government’s borrowings shall be used only for the purpose of financing development expenditure and not for recurrent expenditure”. It is a matter of fiscal responsibility, they say, that the government should borrow only for investment and not for consumption.

So, assuming that Azimio la Umoja One Kenya can sustain either the Bomas of Kenya Talks or yet another wave of protests, what is the end game really? Kenya’s history shows that the prize is likely to be an elite compromise by which a power sharing arrangement of some form or shape may be struck. William Ruto has said he will never do it, and Raila Odinga has said he doesn’t want it, but this is what is going to happen. There is no other way for the two protagonists to walk away satisfied. The status quo ante bellum is such that their hands are tied; they are in the same boat.

In 2016, a near-brawl broke-out in the Kenyan Senate. The respective combatants were Evans Kidero, the then Governor of Nairobi County, and Mike Mbuvi Sonko, his Senator. It is not clear who won the actual fight, but we now know that Nairobians lost because the Auditor General just told us so. You see, during the consecutive gubernatorial administrations of Evans Kidero and Mike Sonko, no-one could explain the whereabouts of KSh 18 billion of collected revenue. For those who think in hard currencies, that is a respectable $12.6 million missing. But Nairobi residents didn’t know this until seven years later when the press finally reported that according to the Auditor General, “billions of shillings collected in Kenya’s capital may have ended in private hands.”

Just over a month ago, it came to light that President William Ruto has, on the advice of the Advisory Committee on the Power of Mercy, freed 5,058 petty convicts, commuted sentences for death row prisoners to life imprisonment, and pardoned 37 convicts including Dr. Davy Koech, once famous for his attempt in the 1980s to find an AIDS cure, but recently notorious for mismanagement of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KeMRI).  For obvious reasons, the July 2023 Presidential Pardon List has been added to the ever increasing number of complaints about President Ruto’s use of executive power, daily compiled by his opponents, as if he had usurped  the prerogative of mercy for himself.