We are at our worst times ever: people have been laid off with many more staring at job losses. Others have had to do with half a salary.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused panic and uncertainty to people who were already in economic doldrums, thanks to unworkable policies and a government of doublespeak. It will now be so difficult to assess the success of the Jubilee government.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has dedicated his second term in office to fighting his deputy but disguising it as fighting corruption and bringing people together. Many discerning Kenyans know better. Those two concepts are so easy to understand and one needs not to take a whole year trying to make people understand and own them.
The reason the majority are not attuned is that what is given by the right hand is taken by the left. Government officials are engaging the populace in long lectures, even wondering why people don't see things their way, but exhibiting hollow rants with incurably unimplementable strands.
One may be excused to conclude that some of the directives they give are never meant to see the light of day or at best meant to hoodwink the masses.
In the midst of this global pandemic, Jubilee is now engaged in a power struggle on which faction should control the ruling party.
According to an agreement deposited with the Registrar of Political Parties, Jubilee was to hold its elections latest March this year. Many party members, especially those allied to Deputy President William Ruto had voiced their readiness in going into these polls as early as last year.
An election is not an event but a process that must have begun much earlier, probably to culminate into the vote at the stipulated time. But those close to the President were nonchalant about the whole idea, more so given that it was a process their prospects were dimming day by day.
So they hatched a plot to frustrate it by not calling the meeting of crucial party organs to kickstart the process. But as if they don't care anymore, they have clandestinely unilaterally appointed their own lackeys to the party management committee to replace those appointed in government in utter disregard to the party leadership in its entirety.
Only the President and his allies knew what was going on. And that's what they call leadership. Now the problem may not be that per se but the timing of such nefarious action by a wing of Jubilee that has never found it necessary to call party elections.
It's the height of dictatorship and flies on the face of all the things the President has been talking about attaining his legacy. To do such things when the country is facing a health crisis is to be contemptuous of the Kenyans' plight.
Jamwa is an economic and political analyst.
