Is this the end of 'tyranny of numbers'?

[Dr. Job]

IS THIS THE END OF 'TYRANNY OF NUMBERS'?

FORMIDABLE DUO: President Uhuru with his deputy William Ruto. For months on end, the impression gained currency that President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto?s majority in Parliament and the Senate was so formidable they could move mountains and level valleys, legislatively speaking.

Saturday, May 10, 2014 - 00:00 -- BY JOE ADAMA

The 'Tyranny of Numbers' narrative so skillfully woven by the Jubilee Coalition of Uhuru Kenyatta’s The National Alliance and William Ruto’s United Republican Party to energize their base for the Kibaki Succession presidential race of March 4, 2013, is having its first real test – and looking more like a tantrum than a tyranny.

The opposition, Coalition for Reforms and Democracy, laughed out loud when first confronted with the Tyranny of Numbers factor late in the presidential campaign in 2012. Cord, compromising former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper and former Trade Minister Moses Wetang’ula’s Ford Kenya, hastily did their math and declared that Tyranny of Numbers simply did not add up.

Cord’s calculus was that though Uhuru’s Kikuyu people and Ruto’s Kalenjin people comprised two of the country’s largest ethnic groups, with the Mt Kenyans at number one and the Rift Valley at number three, there was no way they could tip the scales against the concerted vote bloc power of the rest of the country.

Cord erroneously assumed the attitude that Jubilee’s affiliate parties that took some votes from every other bloc, however modest, counted for nothing. Cord were still laughing their heads off when the election results came in and they found themselves in the minority in both Houses of the National Assembly and the Senate .

Even Cord’s claim to the effect that Jubilee had cheated Raila out of if not outright victory, then a fair chance at a re-run, was not universally considered to be beyond the shadow of a doubt, given the miracle TNA and URP and their affiliates had wrought in the other elective positions.

MPs’ LOBBY SESSION SPUN OUT OF CONTROL For months on end, the impression gained currency that President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto’s majority in Parliament and the Senate was so formidable they could move mountains and level valleys, legislatively speaking, including, ultimately, rewriting key parts of the constitution.

The first signal that the Tyranny of Numbers had its limits came in December 2013, in the regime’s seventh month in office, when Parliament shot down the Miscellaneous Amendments Bill 2013’s proposed amendments to the Public Benefits Organizations Act, 2013 (No. 18 of 2013). It was a bipartisan vote prefaced by Jubilee Leader of the Majority in Parliament Aden Duale’s (Garissa, URP) remarks that he himself had a stake in the success of civil society organisations, coming as he does from a long-marginalized arid and semi-arid lands region.

At the time, Jubilee had so effectively communicated the impression of putting such a lock on Parliament through the Tyranny of Numbers factor that Kenyans were beginning to stop expecting any surprises from the floor of the House. The vote against the NGO Act set a precedent; it signaled it could happen again and happen on a vote that is much more strategic, from Jubilee’s standpoint at the very top, than the whole question of reining in the civil society sector. It happened again on Wednesday April 30, 2014, although this time it was not on the floor of the House.

This time, Jubilee’s MPs voted with their feet, stomping in anger all over a conference room at the Panafric Hotel during a lobbying and whipping session ahead of a vote on whether to pay two Anglo Leasing deals-affiliated companies a total of KSh1.4 billion. The vote was scheduled for just before Parliament took a month’s break. However, in the face of both TNA and URP parliamentarians’ outrage and tantrums, thrown in full view of media cameras and microphones, a stunned state quietly removed the vote from the Order Paper in Parliament.

When Treasury and State Law Office officials, none of whom are politicians as per the new Constitution, invited the ruling Jubilee Coalition’s MPs to a Parliamentary Group meeting at the Panafric Hotel to explain the financial and legal backgrounds to this delicate matter of the most crucial national importance, a huge knowledge gap became evident within minutes.

The gathering soon degenerated into a full-blown rebellion. National Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich looked on in disbelief as a meeting with the legislature convened by the executive spun out of control. The MPs’ attitude amounted to a refusal to approve a report by the Finance and Budget Committees (made up of fellow MPs, not bureaucrats) recommending that the Anglo Leasing-affiliated firms be paid.

This refusal has thrown the Jubilee government’s much-touted plans to issue a sovereign bond on the euro market via the Irish Stock Exchange into considerable confusion. The knowledge gap at Panafric was above all a failure of communications and of presentation. Very senior government officials tried to play the role of communicators and failed miserably – having left their public relations officers, including senior communications professionals, back in their ministry headquarters, twiddling their thumbs and curling their toes.

Paranoia, insults, bully tactics and a display of total ignorance unworthy even of village ------ left the Treasury team as near-traumatized as made no difference. Treasury Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge’s perfectly truthful and correct statement, “Kenya must pay, whether we like it or not,” seemed to drive the gathered MPs wild. He was rudely interrupted and compelled to withdraw the remark, which was nothing but the truth, the whole truth, of the matter. To beat this abject retreat, the PS must have feared for his own physical safety; to coin a phrase, Thugge stared incipient thuggery in the face.“Whether we like it or not” is an automatically irritating formulation of Kenya's politics in its old and disreputable winner-takes-it-all mode associated with the late Shariff Nassir, one of the loudest mouthpieces of former ruling party Kanu at its most unpopular.

It sounds even more imperious in its alliterative Kiswahili form – Mpende msipende! [Memo to Thugge: this phrase is not a useful part of messages of persuasion and diplomacy. It only widens, not seals, knowledge and other gaps]. When Solicitor General Njee Muturi rose to make a legal interpretation of why Kenya must and will pay, he was interrupted even more crassly, with a demand that he names the local partners of the two firms, as if names were a magic wand that would somehow resolve the dilemma. T

he meeting ended in disarray, with the Treasury and State Law Office bureaucrats looking on helplessly as the MPs pranced about, chanting and ranting for the media cameras. Apparently led by Mukurweini MP Kabando wa Kabando, the MPs shouted all manner of slogans, including “Can’t pay? Won’t pay!” and loudly claimed that they were being used to “sanitise a dirty deal”.

URP TALKS TOUGH, ISOLATING RUTO Ruto’s URP legislators were initially divided into two schools of thought here, one targeting Cord’s thinly-veiled glee at the government’s awkward position and the other vowing never, under any circumstances, to vote to pay for the Anglo Leasing contracts. URP critics of Cord pointed out that the opposition was playing cheap and dishonest politics, all their leaders having been members of the previous regime when it quietly paid Sh7 billion to the contractors. Narok West MP Patrick Ntutu and his counterpart in Narok East Ken Kiloku were among the most outspoken and inflexible on the issue.

They demanded that the executive make full disclosure of why taxpayers’ millions should be used in paying the shadowy contractors.

“The Executive must explain everything pertaining to the payments before we can even discuss it in Parliament. We raised those issues during the aborted caucus meeting with the Treasury Cabinet Secretary and other senior officials, but they should know that Parliament will not be used to rubber stamp unpopular decisions,” said Ntutu.

Kiloku warned that the Jubilee administration was sorely mistaken if it was planning to use its numbers in the National Assembly to pay the bills for the dubious projects.

“This time around the Tyranny of Numbers will work against them. Parliament will not be part of the scheme hatched to siphon public coffers,” he declared.

The Deputy President looked all around him and saw the political dangers of being seen to go against the URP grain, particularly the isolation factor. He came out talking tougher even than his MPs and declaring, for good measure, that his opposition to paying the Anglo Leasing firms was the Government’s official position.

This begged the question – so, if the government’s official position is seated over there in that other corner, what did Rotich, Njee, Thugge and other senior officials think they were up to by lobbying the Jubilee MPs at Pan Afric? And are their expert fears for Kenya’s sovereign bond and reputation in the euro zone money markets nothing but a bare-faced lie?

CARRION FOR VULTURE FUNDS?

Something is very wrong somewhere and Kenyans are not being told the whole story. If the big picture is not unveiled between now and the time Parliament reconvenes after its month-long recess, Kenya could join the ranks of a large and growing number of countries that are or were once in conflict or economic collapse, without actually suffering these calamities, that have been sued and coughed up millions of dollars lest their sovereign property be seized, in European, mostly British, and United States jurisdictions, by so-called “Vulture Funds”. These nations include Peru, Liberia, Ethiopia, DRC, Cameroon and Zambia.

The vulture, it is said, is a patient bird. Vulture funds, too, have all the time in the world – and they have much longer beaks than those of their avian cousins. The funds are referred to as vulturine for their distinctive debt-collection strategies. The African Development Bank, a continent-wide institution that is beyond reproach even in Kenya’s deeply paranoid political culture, in a key document published in 2010 and entitled “Vulture Funds in the Sovereign Debt Context”, explained the vulture fund phenomenon in these chilling terms:“The vulture fund modus operandi is simple: purchase distressed debt at deep discounts, refuse to participate in restructuring, and pursue full value of the debt often at face value plus interest, arrears and penalties through litigation, if necessary.

The vulture funds grind down poor countries in cycles of litigation, a practice referred to as ‘champerty’ and largely unknown in African legal systems”.If African legal systems are largely ignorant of the practice of champerty, what about our MPs, of whom only a small number are lawyers? They must be brain-dead to the phenomenon, and it shows! Champerty truly exists and it is no joke. What’s more, it’s about to reduce the number of chapattis that Kenyans have on their plates drastically and there’s precious little that we can do about it.

But while evidence of champerty is there for all to see, complete with the penal interest rates contained in the rulings against Kenya, there is not a single vulture fund in sight, or mention, anywhere. This can only mean that the two Anglo Leasing contractors have not sold the debt owed by Kenya to third parties. It also means that they are supremely confident and self-assured about themselves as licit international companies, a far cry from the shells and fakes proclaimed by Anglo Leasing whistleblowers Maoka Maore and John Githongo almost a decade ago.

This is not to say that Maore and Githongo were entirely deluded or that every Anglo Leasing firm and contract was licit. So, how have these perfectly ordinary firms achieved these vulture fund chilling effects? Perhaps even more worrisome is the question, what would be the effect on Kenya of a real vulture fund, or a whole flight of them, descending on us for debts that we have either forgotten or have been paying too little attention to?

The next flashpoint of crisis and noise surrounding this issue could well be a Parliament that reconvenes a month from now and then proceeds to reassert the Tyranny of Numbers factor and to actually pay the Anglo Leasing firms without so much as a by-your- leave nod in the direction of a mystified – and thoroughly fed up – electorate and broader public.

See more at: IS THIS THE END OF 'TYRANNY OF NUMBERS'? | The Star

 

[Jammu Africa]

IS THIS THE END OF 'TYRANNY OF NUMBERS'?

FORMIDABLE DUO: President Uhuru with his deputy William Ruto. For months on end, the impression gained currency that President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto?s majority in Parliament and the Senate was so formidable they could move mountains and level valleys, legislatively speaking.

Saturday, May 10, 2014 - 00:00 -- BY JOE ADAMA

The 'Tyranny of Numbers' narrative so skillfully woven by the Jubilee Coalition of Uhuru Kenyatta’s The National Alliance and William Ruto’s United Republican Party to energize their base for the Kibaki Succession presidential race of March 4, 2013, is having its first real test – and looking more like a tantrum than a tyranny.

The opposition, Coalition for Reforms and Democracy, laughed out loud when first confronted with the Tyranny of Numbers factor late in the presidential campaign in 2012. Cord, compromising former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper and former Trade Minister Moses Wetang’ula’s Ford Kenya, hastily did their math and declared that Tyranny of Numbers simply did not add up.

Cord’s calculus was that though Uhuru’s Kikuyu people and Ruto’s Kalenjin people comprised two of the country’s largest ethnic groups, with the Mt Kenyans at number one and the Rift Valley at number three, there was no way they could tip the scales against the concerted vote bloc power of the rest of the country.

Cord erroneously assumed the attitude that Jubilee’s affiliate parties that took some votes from every other bloc, however modest, counted for nothing. Cord were still laughing their heads off when the election results came in and they found themselves in the minority in both Houses of the National Assembly and the Senate .

Even Cord’s claim to the effect that Jubilee had cheated Raila out of if not outright victory, then a fair chance at a re-run, was not universally considered to be beyond the shadow of a doubt, given the miracle TNA and URP and their affiliates had wrought in the other elective positions.

MPs’ LOBBY SESSION SPUN OUT OF CONTROL For months on end, the impression gained currency that President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto’s majority in Parliament and the Senate was so formidable they could move mountains and level valleys, legislatively speaking, including, ultimately, rewriting key parts of the constitution.

The first signal that the Tyranny of Numbers had its limits came in December 2013, in the regime’s seventh month in office, when Parliament shot down the Miscellaneous Amendments Bill 2013’s proposed amendments to the Public Benefits Organizations Act, 2013 (No. 18 of 2013). It was a bipartisan vote prefaced by Jubilee Leader of the Majority in Parliament Aden Duale’s (Garissa, URP) remarks that he himself had a stake in the success of civil society organisations, coming as he does from a long-marginalized arid and semi-arid lands region.

At the time, Jubilee had so effectively communicated the impression of putting such a lock on Parliament through the Tyranny of Numbers factor that Kenyans were beginning to stop expecting any surprises from the floor of the House. The vote against the NGO Act set a precedent; it signaled it could happen again and happen on a vote that is much more strategic, from Jubilee’s standpoint at the very top, than the whole question of reining in the civil society sector. It happened again on Wednesday April 30, 2014, although this time it was not on the floor of the House.

This time, Jubilee’s MPs voted with their feet, stomping in anger all over a conference room at the Panafric Hotel during a lobbying and whipping session ahead of a vote on whether to pay two Anglo Leasing deals-affiliated companies a total of KSh1.4 billion. The vote was scheduled for just before Parliament took a month’s break. However, in the face of both TNA and URP parliamentarians’ outrage and tantrums, thrown in full view of media cameras and microphones, a stunned state quietly removed the vote from the Order Paper in Parliament.

When Treasury and State Law Office officials, none of whom are politicians as per the new Constitution, invited the ruling Jubilee Coalition’s MPs to a Parliamentary Group meeting at the Panafric Hotel to explain the financial and legal backgrounds to this delicate matter of the most crucial national importance, a huge knowledge gap became evident within minutes.

The gathering soon degenerated into a full-blown rebellion. National Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich looked on in disbelief as a meeting with the legislature convened by the executive spun out of control. The MPs’ attitude amounted to a refusal to approve a report by the Finance and Budget Committees (made up of fellow MPs, not bureaucrats) recommending that the Anglo Leasing-affiliated firms be paid.

This refusal has thrown the Jubilee government’s much-touted plans to issue a sovereign bond on the euro market via the Irish Stock Exchange into considerable confusion. The knowledge gap at Panafric was above all a failure of communications and of presentation. Very senior government officials tried to play the role of communicators and failed miserably – having left their public relations officers, including senior communications professionals, back in their ministry headquarters, twiddling their thumbs and curling their toes.

Paranoia, insults, bully tactics and a display of total ignorance unworthy even of village ------ left the Treasury team as near-traumatized as made no difference. Treasury Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge’s perfectly truthful and correct statement, “Kenya must pay, whether we like it or not,” seemed to drive the gathered MPs wild. He was rudely interrupted and compelled to withdraw the remark, which was nothing but the truth, the whole truth, of the matter. To beat this abject retreat, the PS must have feared for his own physical safety; to coin a phrase, Thugge stared incipient thuggery in the face.“Whether we like it or not” is an automatically irritating formulation of Kenya's politics in its old and disreputable winner-takes-it-all mode associated with the late Shariff Nassir, one of the loudest mouthpieces of former ruling party Kanu at its most unpopular.

It sounds even more imperious in its alliterative Kiswahili form – Mpende msipende! [Memo to Thugge: this phrase is not a useful part of messages of persuasion and diplomacy. It only widens, not seals, knowledge and other gaps]. When Solicitor General Njee Muturi rose to make a legal interpretation of why Kenya must and will pay, he was interrupted even more crassly, with a demand that he names the local partners of the two firms, as if names were a magic wand that would somehow resolve the dilemma. T

he meeting ended in disarray, with the Treasury and State Law Office bureaucrats looking on helplessly as the MPs pranced about, chanting and ranting for the media cameras. Apparently led by Mukurweini MP Kabando wa Kabando, the MPs shouted all manner of slogans, including “Can’t pay? Won’t pay!” and loudly claimed that they were being used to “sanitise a dirty deal”.

URP TALKS TOUGH, ISOLATING RUTO Ruto’s URP legislators were initially divided into two schools of thought here, one targeting Cord’s thinly-veiled glee at the government’s awkward position and the other vowing never, under any circumstances, to vote to pay for the Anglo Leasing contracts. URP critics of Cord pointed out that the opposition was playing cheap and dishonest politics, all their leaders having been members of the previous regime when it quietly paid Sh7 billion to the contractors. Narok West MP Patrick Ntutu and his counterpart in Narok East Ken Kiloku were among the most outspoken and inflexible on the issue.

They demanded that the executive make full disclosure of why taxpayers’ millions should be used in paying the shadowy contractors.

“The Executive must explain everything pertaining to the payments before we can even discuss it in Parliament. We raised those issues during the aborted caucus meeting with the Treasury Cabinet Secretary and other senior officials, but they should know that Parliament will not be used to rubber stamp unpopular decisions,” said Ntutu.

Kiloku warned that the Jubilee administration was sorely mistaken if it was planning to use its numbers in the National Assembly to pay the bills for the dubious projects.

“This time around the Tyranny of Numbers will work against them. Parliament will not be part of the scheme hatched to siphon public coffers,” he declared.

The Deputy President looked all around him and saw the political dangers of being seen to go against the URP grain, particularly the isolation factor. He came out talking tougher even than his MPs and declaring, for good measure, that his opposition to paying the Anglo Leasing firms was the Government’s official position.

This begged the question – so, if the government’s official position is seated over there in that other corner, what did Rotich, Njee, Thugge and other senior officials think they were up to by lobbying the Jubilee MPs at Pan Afric? And are their expert fears for Kenya’s sovereign bond and reputation in the euro zone money markets nothing but a bare-faced lie?

CARRION FOR VULTURE FUNDS?

Something is very wrong somewhere and Kenyans are not being told the whole story. If the big picture is not unveiled between now and the time Parliament reconvenes after its month-long recess, Kenya could join the ranks of a large and growing number of countries that are or were once in conflict or economic collapse, without actually suffering these calamities, that have been sued and coughed up millions of dollars lest their sovereign property be seized, in European, mostly British, and United States jurisdictions, by so-called “Vulture Funds”. These nations include Peru, Liberia, Ethiopia, DRC, Cameroon and Zambia.

The vulture, it is said, is a patient bird. Vulture funds, too, have all the time in the world – and they have much longer beaks than those of their avian cousins. The funds are referred to as vulturine for their distinctive debt-collection strategies. The African Development Bank, a continent-wide institution that is beyond reproach even in Kenya’s deeply paranoid political culture, in a key document published in 2010 and entitled “Vulture Funds in the Sovereign Debt Context”, explained the vulture fund phenomenon in these chilling terms:“The vulture fund modus operandi is simple: purchase distressed debt at deep discounts, refuse to participate in restructuring, and pursue full value of the debt often at face value plus interest, arrears and penalties through litigation, if necessary.

The vulture funds grind down poor countries in cycles of litigation, a practice referred to as ‘champerty’ and largely unknown in African legal systems”.If African legal systems are largely ignorant of the practice of champerty, what about our MPs, of whom only a small number are lawyers? They must be brain-dead to the phenomenon, and it shows! Champerty truly exists and it is no joke. What’s more, it’s about to reduce the number of chapattis that Kenyans have on their plates drastically and there’s precious little that we can do about it.

But while evidence of champerty is there for all to see, complete with the penal interest rates contained in the rulings against Kenya, there is not a single vulture fund in sight, or mention, anywhere. This can only mean that the two Anglo Leasing contractors have not sold the debt owed by Kenya to third parties. It also means that they are supremely confident and self-assured about themselves as licit international companies, a far cry from the shells and fakes proclaimed by Anglo Leasing whistleblowers Maoka Maore and John Githongo almost a decade ago.

This is not to say that Maore and Githongo were entirely deluded or that every Anglo Leasing firm and contract was licit. So, how have these perfectly ordinary firms achieved these vulture fund chilling effects? Perhaps even more worrisome is the question, what would be the effect on Kenya of a real vulture fund, or a whole flight of them, descending on us for debts that we have either forgotten or have been paying too little attention to?

The next flashpoint of crisis and noise surrounding this issue could well be a Parliament that reconvenes a month from now and then proceeds to reassert the Tyranny of Numbers factor and to actually pay the Anglo Leasing firms without so much as a by-your- leave nod in the direction of a mystified – and thoroughly fed up – electorate and broader public.

See more at: IS THIS THE END OF 'TYRANNY OF NUMBERS'? | The Star

Star newspaper can write anything, we are used to it.

What people forget is that, Uhuruto are not Kibaki-Raila.

These two gentlemen understand each other and are not
in competition to each other, unlike Kibaki-Raila era.

The first time i heard about those Anglo-leasing payments,
i got mad just like those jubilee MP's but now i understand
what is all about.

The president talked about it, why have we not heard
the same jubilee MP's complaining???

What about the deputy president???

Because i'm sure that they talked together before
the president spoke to the nation.

Jubilee members are not fools, they will never disintegrate
and give CORD chance to reign.

CORD is just behaving like that hyena which followed that
swinging hand believing that it will fall down.

Jubilee are in this ship together and will not let it sink for they
know that they will all go down.

So in short, tyranny of numbers will be around for twenty years
to come.:smiling::smiling:

I can say that very confidently.