My administration has made Kenya better than we found it
President Uhuru Kenyatta
Fellow Kenyans,
It gives me great pleasure to celebrate the 58th Madaraka Day in Kisumu. I thank the people and area leaders and the entire Nyanza region for the warm welcome, and the great work that has gone into hosting this year’s celebrations. It is wonderful to be back here.
To celebrate the cultural diversity of Kenya and strengthen nationhood, in 2015, I established rotational hosting of national days’ celebrations in the counties.
Today, Kisumu joins the growing list of counties to have played host to a national event.
This allows for a focus on the positive contributions being made under devolution, while enabling the hosting county to showcase itself on the national stage.
Today, we mark close to six decades of self-rule, the return of our liberties, the restoration of our dignity and the democratic resilience we’ve built.
We also celebrate the war heroes who gave their all for us to be free. They sacrificed their freedom and lives, knowing fully well that sometimes those who plant the seeds of freedom may never enjoy the fruits.
For their martyrdom, we honour our fallen heroes this Madaraka Day. And we do it fully conscious that “a nation that does not honour its heroes, will receive no honour among nations” – to quote one thinker.
Today, we must also honour our founding fathers who dared to imagine Kenya — the bold and selfless architects of this great republic.
As we honour them, we must recall their principles of nationhood. One, they taught us that a progressive nation is one that is in continuous conversation with itself because nationhood is a negotiated process that needs constant alignments and adjustments in the pursuit of perfection.
Paradox of choices
Two, they taught us that self-rule is not an end in itself; it is a means to a greater end.
Indeed as Tom Joseph Mboya once said, “Only through freedom and human rights could a people cooperate fully with their government”. But for freedom and human rights to be realised, the paradox of choices must be resolved.
And, three, they revealed the paradox when they emphasised that self-rule is the granting of opportunities, accompanied by the burden of choice.
Every opportunity in the exercise of freedoms and self-rule, must be tempered by the consequences of choice.
Every right granted must have a corresponding responsibility. And those who enjoy opportunities, but neglect the burden of choice, cannot be said to be truly free.
This paradox of choices and freedoms applies to both individuals and institutions.
Based on some of these teachings, we have built one of the most robust democracies in Africa. The fields of individual freedoms have expanded and citizen participation has become emboldened.
Our independent institutions have occupied their rightful positions, and all of this is because of the 2010 Constitution — probably the most progressive in Africa and the world.
However, since the Constitution expanded our individual fields of freedom, it also expanded the burden of the choices we make.
Even our founding fathers urged the liberated patriots to shift from the status of being subjects to that of citizens when their fields of freedom were expanded.
They made it clear that a citizen is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with freedom; while a subject will squander opportunities granted by self-rule and refuse to shoulder the burden of their choices.
Similarly, the framers of the Constitution did not envisage a situation where the expanded fields of rights results in diminished responsibility by citizens and institutions.
They saw a balance between freedoms and the consequences of choice.
But this balance is probably most challenged by the growth of independent institutions, which has stretched our democratic boundaries to the limit though has not cracked them.
It has bent, but not broken, the will of the people. In fact, any other African country experiencing the political turns and twists we have experienced in the search for greater perfection in our nationhood would have burst asunder.
From the nullification of a presidential election in 2017 to an attempt to stop the will of the people as expressed through BBI, the Judiciary has tested our constitutional limits.
While I stand by the rule of law and I will always obey decisions of the courts, I am also compelled by my position to heed the sovereign and supreme voice of Kenyans.
That is why our national conversation today must focus on the consequences of choice.
If the citizens are required to exercise their will and shoulder the burden of choices, should the independent institutions not do likewise?
If the field of independence has been expanded in the Judiciary, how should the field of their responsibility respond to the summons of nationhood? Shouldn’t their decisions also be accompanied by a burden of choice?
These are the questions our national conversation should objectively ponder.
I have two reasons for this: One, when the court annulled 2017 presidential election, we lost Sh1 trillion as an economy in only 123 days, all for naught. Who carried the burden of this choice?
Was it the Judiciary or the people? It is the latter. Development programmes meant to make a difference in their lives had to be shelved, courtesy of the decision.
Questions to Judiciary
Two, BBI is meant to build bridges, create inclusive politics and end the ethnic majoritarianism of two tribes.
If the court had subjected its decision to stop BBI to a cost-benefit analysis, if it had considered the burden of choice, then, these are the questions the Judiciary would have asked: If we are in a constitutional moment, is a decision against BBI a decision in support of the status quo?
If BBI were to be stopped, who carries the burden of choice? On whose shoulders will ethnic majoritarianism of two communities rest? And who will carry the burden of losing 30 per cent of budget every five years to the toxic politics BBI seeks to resolve?
Can Kenya truly be a democracy if the people are denied opportunity to express their sovereignty and supreme choice at the ballot box, on the basis of elevating technicalities over the overriding objectives of law?
Now I will turn to the national question of our times as is tradition every Madaraka Day.
But before I do so, I wish to remind us of an instruction left behind by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta: “Our children, born and unborn, may learn about the heroes of the past. But our present task is to make ourselves the architects of the future”.
This was a call to action. It was a call to predict the future by creating it. And against this background, the national question of the moment must be asked.
If, indeed, freedom is nothing but an opportunity to become better, how have we enriched what founding fathers placed in our custody? Have we made it better than we found it?
In response, I will use the “four frames” of our liberation struggle that have informed my administration. The first is economic.
This frame is informed by the notion that political freedom in the absence of economic freedom is nothing but an illusion.
Given that our forefathers stood for economic inclusion and the administration before mine was about economic recovery; my administration has embraced the maxim of economic acceleration.
Economic acceleration is about increasing the speed of achieving goals at the national, county and individual levels.
The achievements
At the national level, the colonisers left us with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the measure for the National Cake — of Sh6.4 billion in 1963 at the exchange rate of that time. After 74 years of colonial occupation, this is what Kenya was worth every year.
Then the combined administrations of Mzee Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki increased this to Sh4.5 trillion in a span of 50 years.
But in only eight years, my administration has raised it to Sh10.3 trillion. Our economic acceleration programme has multiplied what forefathers left in our custody.
At the county level, we have allocated Sh2.3 trillion to counties (about 16 per cent of the GDP).
We have achieved this in seven years and the BBI dream is to send even more resources (35 per cent of the GDP) to the counties to catalyse their accelerated development.
At the individual level, our economic acceleration initiative has focused on the allocation of title deeds.
I am proud to say we have accelerated land adjudication in an unprecedented way.
The previous administrations issued six million deeds in 50 years, we have issued 5.1 million in seven years.
The second frame is what I call, “the Big Push Investments”, which are about laying the ground for economic take off.
Many Kenyans have asked why my administration is investing in big infrastructure projects —the roads, rails and ports. My answer is: When Cecil Rhodes, the British coloniser and his brothers dreamt of a road from Cape Town to Cairo, their vision was not the road.
The road was not the dream. The dream was what the road would do for them. In the same vein, the dream in building roals, rails and ports is what the “Big Push Investments” will do for Kenya.
All our “Big Push Investments” have been conceived to catalyse the economy and to provide the most rational choices for all actors.
The third frame is that of the restoration of dignity. Our founding fathers defined ‘dignity’ as ‘freedom from want’.
From the outset, liberation from the ‘poverty of dignity’ was a central motif of our independence struggle.
The national question we must ask is whether we are on track in liberating our people from the poverty of dignity.
To what extent have we liberated them from ‘want’? Articles 23 and 43 of the Constitution make the restoration of dignity a continuous process rather than a one-off activity.
And the question this Madaraka Day is how well we have rendered this.
Some may ask what ‘poverty of dignity’ is and I will explain. When a kidney disease patient had to travel 70km from Siaya to Kisumu thrice a week for dialysis, that was a tragic indignity.
The patient needed 10 dialysis sessions a month at a cost of between Sh9,000 and Sh16,000 each, translating to between Sh90,000 and Sh160,000 a month.
How many subsistence farmers in Siaya can afford this without selling property?
Their illnesses ended up disinheriting families and indignifying the generations to come. This is what poverty of dignity looks like.
Today, I am happy to note that the patient in Siaya does not have to travel to Kisumu for treatment.
There are dialysis machines in Siaya at the sub-county level. Similarly, he does not have the Sh160,000 for treatment; all he needs is to spend Sh500 on a NHIF card and get free dialysis every month.
Political stability agenda
If dignity is ‘freedom from want’, then we have restored it using our health interventions; in fact, we have accelerated it. Between 1963 and 1978, Kenya had only one renal unit and a dialysis machine.
President Moi added one and Kibaki added four more renal units. Today, and in only six years, we have 54 renal units with 360 state-of-the-art dialysis machines across the country.
Coupled with the NHIF card, this uprated health infrastructure has restored the dignity of families previously condemned to disinherit children because of disease.
Very briefly on the fourth frame... For us to secure what we have achieved in 58 years, we must not make politics the heat and light of our national existence.
Instead, we must endeavour to pursue political stabilisation by any means necessary because stability is the life-blood of our republic. What we have built for 58 years, can be destroyed in one day of political instability.
I want to invite us to upgrade status from being politicians to being leaders. Politicians are obsessed with personal gain; but our national pain disturbs leaders.
Happy Madaraka Day. — This is the abridged version of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech on the 58th Madaraka Day celebration yesterday
