June 1. It's mid-morning in Kabarnet in Baringo county but the sun is scorching. The vernacular radio I am tuned to is discussing a similarly hot topic that can easily melt an iron rod.
It is Madaraka Day. The whole of Jubilee administration led by President Uhuru Kenyatta is being hosted in the Lakeside by Baba himself. He is unable to stop smiling, what with the millions upon millions worth of goodies from the son of Jomo, thanks to the three-year-old Handshake.
I listen with a keen ear to the animated discussions on the radio. After three hours of my ears being battered with demands and complaints from the radio’s angry listeners, I can’t help but conclude that my people — the Kalenjins from Mt Elgon to Baringo county — have had it up to their necks.
They are not happy with Uhuru for 'mistreating' their son and as if that were not enough, he denies their region development yet, they say, 'we voted for him three times to a man.'
Kalenjins feel utterly betrayed by the President and the whole JP administration. They aren’t happy seeing 'people who didn’t vote for the Jubilee Party.
Their feelings were well projected by their 70 elected politicians who met last week to find ways of bringing development to the region. (Please feel free to burst into laughter).
The politicians, largely drawn from the Tangatanga camp, gave the impression that, waiting for Uhuru to give them an iota of development from now on was like waiting for Godot, ably narrated in a play by the same title by the renowned Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett.
The well-fed politicians, half of them owning choppers and top-of-the-range fleets of gas guzzlers, painfully explained to their poverty-stricken voters why they (people) are being strangled by hunger, disease, a comatose healthcare infrastructure, poor road network, deadly corruption and an agricultural sector in the mortuary.
Wait a minute, where have they been until now? What have they been doing since 2013 when JP took the reins of power? Have these self-seeking knuckleheads just discovered that Rift Valley is in a sorry state? Okay, they have just landed on planet Earth from Jupiter or is it Pluto?
This warped thinking of our leaders is heart-wrenching. They are gathering because it is that time of the campaign period when they are going back to the electorate for more votes after five years of being AWOL.
They don’t care an inch about the welfare of the people on whose behalf they claim to speak. They are looking for more funds to expand their already protruding tummies. They want to use any money they get for development to expand their business empires and seek votes to go back to Parliament to eat again, as they have always done.
Their call to form a 14-member technical committee ostensibly to craft the region’s economic and political agenda ahead of 2022 is a tragicomedy. Their unsolicited sentiments are both tragic and comic stuff fit for the Churchill Show and not primetime news.
Their weak press conference contained dramatic episodes coupled with comic elements. In fact, there was enough comic relief to lighten up the overall mood in the theatre of the absurd starring some of the worst armature actors in a serious play with a tragic ending.
These fat cats have no intention of improving on anything they are talking about. MPs have received billions of shillings for the Constituency Development Fund since 2003.
The introduction of CDF had good intentions but greedy MPs spoiled the party. They poured the money into their bottomless pockets. If they had used this money for its intended purpose, they wouldn’t be holding useless press conferences preparing the ground for another round of empty promises.
CDF was meant to bring equity in the distribution of development resources across regions and to control imbalance brought about by historical injustices by successive regimes that cherished lopsided development policies.
Rift Valley has held the number two seat in political leadership since 2013.
But see!
A governor outlined agriculture, conservation, water, infrastructure as some of the issues on the agenda.
"We must start by ensuring we have concrete issues that we shall negotiate for our people in this government and beyond 2022," he said.
Jebet is a journalist and media consultant
