I recently sat down in State House to discuss with His Excellency the President his recent cabinet appointments. After toasting with tots of excellent scotch, despite the fact that it was a morning program, we soon got down to business. The following are excerpts from the interview.
Me: Mr. President, there has been a lot of criticism, especially on social media regarding your recent cabinet appointments…
H.E: What kind of criticism?
Me: For example the sporting fraternity cannot understand how you settled on Rashid Mohammed as the CS for sports and heritage
H.E: Look, Rashid lost in the recent elections, it has also been reported that he has been caught up in hooliganism manenos. Now think about our football heritage for example, always losing and fans always resorting to hooliganism, I fail to see how people don’t see this as a perfect match. Who else are they complaining about? Dr. Margaret Kobia might be old school, which makes her the perfect candidate to be in charge of a docket that handles the youth… we do not need someone who can understand modern young people and their issues but rather someone who can beat…spank…instil discipline the old fashioned way… Peter Munya brings his experience dealing miraa issues with Somalia to the wider East Africa Community, a ministry where we need someone vocal, someone who cannot keep his mouth shut
Me: What about Farida Karoney at the Lands ministry from a broadcasting background…
H.E: That one ask the Deputy President
Me: Kenyans are also concerned that you have created new positions, those of Administrative Secretaries to reward cronies and election losers…
H.E: To reward one crony and election loser. The post was created for Ababu Namwamba, primarily to carry Monica Juma’s purse in the corridors of Foreign Affairs as we don’t think he can do anything else but since we cannot have it in only one ministry we thought we might as well have it all round…
Me: His Excellency, were you not concerned about the rising wage bill?
H.E: A new round of Eurobond is coming, let the next president worry about that
Me: The appointment of failed Cabinet Secretaries, especially that of Cleopa Mailu to serve as Ambassadors and heads of foreign missions seemed to have also rubbed many Kenyans the wrong way…
H.E: They failed, right? The idea here is to let them go and fail outside the country. Kenyans do not want to see them holding public positions here so what better way to kill two birds with several stones than to have them go abroad?
Me: There has also been uproar about appointing only 6 women to the cabinet thereby falling short of the constitutional threshold
H.E: My brother, 7 out of 22 is already 30 percent, no?
Me: But they are 6 women cabinet secretaries, not 7
H.E: It looks like people are forgetting to count Honorable Tuju…and remember she’s without portfolio so we can count her as two or three persons, right?
Me: Err, Mr. President, I still think…
H.E: I think we have had enough for this morning. You media people don’t give us the credit we deserve. To take this county from where Kibaki left it back to the glory days of Nyayo is no mean feat. Kibaki had basically stopped borrowing and we have brought it back in a big way, anyway my time is up. Look at what we are doing with the media, shutting them down when they misbehave, aren’t we taking us back to the golden Nyayo era? Give my administration a break please! Care for a Scotch?
#Satire
