The roundup this week starts in county 019, or Nyeri, if you stunk in math —like me. Hosting 38 of the 47 governors, half of the top government officials, Opposition chief Raila Odinga, retired President Mwai Kibaki and his sitting successor Uhuru Kenyatta, the county was bursting from the seems in opulence.
Indeed, as someone joked, if power had actual weight, Nyeri would be sitting metres below, having sunk from the sheer kilos. Besides the show of power that bordered on extravagance (18 helicopters in a village), the burial of the first Nyeri governor Nderitu Gachagua provided a platform for rare convergence between Raila and Uhuru Kenyatta, the man he is seeking to make jobless in August.
They hit out MCAs for making devolution harder than it should be to implement. This was apt considering the death of Gachagua’s is claimed to have been hastened by his unending wars with the members of his County Assembly.
And MCAs were not the only ones to get hit hard during the week. Doctors, who have been on strike for more than 90 days, found themselves staring at the bare-knuckled fist thrown by the combined might of a President and Council of Governors that had lost every ounce of patience.
While Kenyans empathised with the medics at the start of their industrial action, their refusal to consider a sizeable pay hike combined with a general feeling the strike had taken a political dimension has lost the medics Kenyans’ goodwill.
The fact that seasoned mediators including the chief unionist Francis Atwoli, KNCHR, LSK, and senior most clergy were unable to make the medics budge lend credence to the assumption the strike was being used for ulterior (read political) reasons.
And even as some doctors lost their jobs, the Opposition, sadly, continued to cheer them on, oblivious of the suffering ordinary Kenyans were facing. And, when Raila suffered food poisoning on Wednesday, he was promptly rushed to Karen Hospital where a team of doctors were at hand to wait on him.
He is fine now, but that did not stop some media outlets, including some reputable houses, probably out of mischief reporting that ODM leader ‘had been poisoned’.
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