Senate, you are on your own
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday washed his hands of the deadlock in the Senate over the formula for the sharing of funds amongst the counties.
The Senate has become like a theatre of the absurd, spending long days debating, caucusing and meetings as different groups struggle to arrive at a compromise on the sharing of funds amongst the counties.
With brinkmanship taking centre stage, hopes have been that the country’s leadership could negotiate a truce out of the mess created by the Commission on Revenue Allocation, which the President pointed out.
The Jubilee Party’s leadership in that House has proved ineffective in pushing through the formula preferred by the Government.
The plan that saw three senators arrested on the morning of voting appeared to backfire: it was too evident that the arrests were political and were later roundly condemned. When Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i arrived at the Senate to explain the decision, the Committee in charge locked out the media and lost the narrative as conflicting reports would later emerge from that meeting.
With the President apparently no longer interested in that fight, the team will perhaps need to consider a soft concession for the sake of the country, and a possible explanation for the voters they seek to please by holding on to a decision they apparently do not have the numbers to defend.