What Awaits President William Ruto After Inauguration

Tuesday the 13th of September, 2022, constitutionally, is the day set for the inauguration of the new president of Kenya.

His Excellency William Ruto has had to contend with politically motivated hurdles upon hurdles that for a while seemed insurmountable. The race to Statehouse is over but with that, a new race to be run over the next five years, begins.

First, the Ruto administration arrives to empty coffers. The events around establishing their reason for emptyness will be as fast as those associated with finding funds to plug obvious holes.

Oil marketers are reportedly owed 140 billion and unsettled bills across the board are in the range of half a billion shillings to possibly six hundred billion. The grapevine is rife with talk of saboteurs doing their thing in the shadows of the hand over of government to the Ruto team.

The election pledges that captured the electorate's imagination certainly set high expectations that must return early results, if the new administration is to settle down to work with high marks.

Sections of the civil service with partisanship have displayed the kind of inertia that ends up with their termination of services an obvious end. There is a long list of late-in-the-day appointments in state departments, corporations and the foreign service that might necessitate a rethink.

With a president-elect that has sent a warning shot to cartels upon uttering the words: "...., so help me, God", we are in for drastic times as the new administration recalibrates the economy in alignment with its bottom-up approach. This will not be a walk in the park as cartels are known to fight back.

The new administration has a 40-day window to ride on the high goodwill of an expectant citizenry, before things level down to the business-as-usual government talk.

Early indications are that the new president wants to run a meritocracy. The president-elect wants to walk the tight rope of avoiding political buddies from becoming administrative burdens.

The huge debt bedeviling the country affords the new broom the opportunity to further decipher and renegotiate or sweep the burden of misused funds in the direction of responsible officials. Kenyans are carrying the burden of badly utilised loans through heavy taxation with no signs of respite. The Kenya Kwanza side told us that they would look into this.

The port city of Mombasa is today a pale shadow of what it once was economically. The port operations brought inland by the outgoing regime has exposed the coastal city to increased joblessness and seen several businesses shutdown. President Ruto must fulfil his pledge to take back the operations as before.

The tea sector was mismanaged by the outgoing regime to the extent that when covering up for their blunder of messing around with the tea auction, they pushed KTDA to borrow over 60 billion shillings to pay grower bonuses for lots of unsold teas that continue to fill up warehouses, over a year since they were manufactured. Every buyer has shunned KTDA teas.

Recently, the KTDA board blew up 2 million shillings on alcohol at a top end hotel in Mombasa. Their reason for being at the coast, was to receive a fertilizer consignment and not a board retreat. Most tea growers still hope to one day holiday in Mombasa, but their hopes are diminished by such largesse. Most tea growers are hustlers and therefore it will be an easy choice to make for the new president, we hope.

This article must end here as I am unable to carry on with teary eyes. The pain is real. I am emotionally affected and I say, over to you Mr. President.