State obsessed with task forces it ignores

In the starkest admission of the failures of his new university funding model, President William Ruto last Monday set up a 129-member committee to review the contentious framework.

The decision came in the wake of public criticism over the funding model that many describe as discriminative and which has disenfranchised those from poor backgrounds.

Faced with the choice of either keeping or shelving the model, the Head of State chose to engage another task force of sorts, never mind it had been developed through a similar body led by Raphael Munavu, a former university lecturer.

Prof Munavu’s Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms, which engaged multiple stakeholders, had proposed far-reaching reforms, the most consequential of which being a review in university funding.

If the recommendations are discarded, it could mean that part of the Munavu’s recommendations and the experiment that the funding model has been, go down the drain.

That has been the path for many reports of task forces, the government’s responses to emerging issues, established since independence.

Ruto’s move, days after he unveiled a strategic framework to implement reforms in the National Police Service, exposed his love for task forces, an obsession that successive governments have failed to shake off over the years.

The framework was developed by a committee led by Interior Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo based on the recommendations of a task force on police reforms led by former Chief Justice David Maraga.

It is unclear whether the government will fully implement Maraga’s recommendations, but the signs do not look promising. The Head of State recently said it would cost Sh106 billion to implement all of the proposals, an amount not at the government’s disposal.

“The required funds will largely be provided for from the ex-chequer and from other partners, whom we will engage,” said Ruto.

And so Maraga’s recommendations are also likely to end up gathering dust in some government office, given the budgetary constraints that may hinder its full implementation.

Ruto has expressed his commitment to implement the proposals, somewhat eliminating the previous hurdle in the enactment of the recommendations, political goodwill. Indeed, he embraced the Munavu proposals with open arms, rolling it out.

Similarly, the government seems invested in the Pending Bills Verification Committee (Nadco), formed in September last year, granting hope to contractors the government owes. Its effectiveness will be gauged on whether the State eventually clears its pending bills.

But Ruto has faltered in other aspects such as on the National Dialogue Committee’s proposals. For most of the time, he had seemed to string along the committee, formed in the wake of the opposition’s anti-government protests last year.

Before Ruto’s broad-based deal with former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, opposition figures had lamented over the government’s non-commitment in implementing Nadco recommendations. Such complaints have featured over the years in the wake of costly public inquiries, building mistrust among the citizenry.

When the President proposed a 100-member task force to look into the issues of youthful protesters who brought his administration to its knees, Generation Zs and Millennials opposed it as another effort to hoodwink them.

They also argued that it made no sense that the government would need a committee to talk about issues they had been talking about on social media, about which the government knew but was unwilling to act on.

The same argument featured when the President proposed to set up a team to lead a forensic audit of the country’s public debt. The Law Society of Kenya, whose president, Faith Odhiambo, was nominated to serve in the committee, rejected the task force as infringing in the role of the Office of the Auditor General.

Ruto has suffered another blow when he tried to set up an inquiry into the Shakahola massacre, which claimed more than 400 lives. High Court judge Lawrence Mugambi found that its formation violated the Constitution.

“The President’s action in establishing a Commission of Inquiry and assigning it the parallel mandate to those assigned by the Constitution to Independent Offices and Commissions and various legislation undermines their powers and authority and is thus unconstitutional,” ruled Justice Mugambi.

But the President had successfully set up a parallel one to recommend the legal and regulatory framework governing religious organisations led by Rev Mutava Musyimi, which submitted its report to him in July.

These fate has befallen previous other teams, including BBI.