In a recent interview with Nation, President Uhuru Kenyatta shed some light upon recent developments in our political landscape.
Amidst the chaos of the global health pandemic, it has sometimes been difficult to understand the true nature of the political changes that are transpiring in our government.
While most media coverage as of late has been dedicated to daily updates about Covid-19, few of us have missed that some fundamental restructuring is occurring at Kenya’s highest echelons.
2022 POLITICKING
This, coupled with so much 2022 politicking, has left many of us scratching our heads regarding what exactly our leaders have been arguing about.
But for Mr Kenyatta’s part, at least, he has now spoken out and given a better indication of what he is trying to achieve. His words indicate a continued commitment to the promises he made to us as a nation in 2013 and again in 2017.
Chief among those are the Big Four Agenda, ending corruption, and pursuing national unity. As he said, “I have not deviated.” Indeed, through all of the vicissitudes that are the Kenyan political theatre, his fundamental goals have remained the same.
For most of the past year or two, the anti-corruption campaign seemed to be on the tips of everybody’s tongues.
From the highest magistrates to the ordinary motorists facing police roadblocks, every person in Kenya was speaking about the cancer of corruption, about what government was doing to tackle it, and most of all, about the need to defeat it once and for all.
GLOBAL PANDEMIC
Just because we have been catapulted into an unwanted global health pandemic, it does not mean that corruption is once again allowed to rage rampantly.
It might be more difficult to enforce anti-corruption right now, but the campaign is not over. It is going on all the time, even if we see it less in the news.
As for the Big Four Agenda, yes – achieving development goals is certainly more difficult while our economy plunges south and physical distancing hinders every aspect of our daily lives. But as Kenyans, we are aspirational.
We will not simply give up and resign ourselves to low income country status. We might not get to middle income within the next decade as the Vision 2030 plan proposes, but get there we shall.
BIG FOUR
And rather than putting their money where their mouth is and getting behind the Big Four, a lot of politicians both ostensibly allied to Kenyatta, as well as political foes, seem to be spending more time working for personal gain than national gain.
Mr Kihoro is a Research and Data expert. Email: [email protected]
