President William Ruto has effectively fired Mr Justin Muturi from the Cabinet just days ahead of his anticipated tour of the Mt Kenya region. Mr Muturi was the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service, Human Capital Development and Social Programmes.
The President has nominated Mr Geoffrey Kiringa Ruku, currently the Member of Parliament for Mbeere North to replace Mr Muturi. Mr Ruku is a DP legislator, meaning that the pre-election Memorandum of Understanding between the President’s UDA party and the Democratic Party still holds.
Mr Muturi was the leader of DP until his appointment to the Cabinet. In other far-reaching changes to the government’s top policy organ, the President has nominated Ms Hanna Wendot Cheptumo as the CS for Gender, Culture, The Arts and Heritage.
There was no CS for that portfolio after President Ruto’s earlier nominee, Ms Stella Soi. She will await confirmation by the National Assembly before she can take up her role. Ms Wendot is the widow of Senator William Cheptumo, who died last month.
The President’s close ally and confidante, Mr Aden Duale, has also been moved from the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry to the Health Ministry. He swaps places with the embattled CS, Dr Deborrah Mlongo Barasa, who has been at great pains to convince the public that the public health system — known as the Social Health Insurance Fund — has been working.
This will be a tough assignment for Mr Duale, who was earlier moved from the Ministry of Defence to Environment in an earlier reshuffle.
On Monday, while hosting Muslim and government leaders for Iftar, President Ruto said that in his earlier role as the Attorney-General, Mr Muturi was “incompetent”, accusing him of delaying government programmes.
Mr Muturi was replaced by Ms Dorothy Oduor in August last year.
Earlier reports had at the time indicated that Mr Muturi was fired in the wake of the Gen Z protests, which shook the government in June last year. A special Gazette Notice later indicated that he had stepped down from the role.
The intrigues behind his ouster as the government’s top legal were covered exclusively in the August edition of The Nairobi Law Monthly. Mr Muturi’s 54-year-old son was among Kenyans who were abducted in the crackdown against the protesters.
The then AG later told the media that he had to seek the personal intervention of the President to secure his son’s release by officers believed to be members of the National Intelligence Service. He later went on an offensive against the Ruto administration, arguing that he would not attend Cabinet meetings until the issue of the abductions was addressed at that level.
He recently told a media outlet that he had so far skipped three Cabinet meetings. Mr Muturi’s sacking comes just days ahead of President Ruto’s tour of the Mt Kenya region, where Mr Muturi hails from.
The tour comes amid a fallout between the people of the region and the government following the ouster of
Mr Rigathi Gachagua as Deputy President and his replacement by Prof Kithure Kindiki.
The intrigues of his ouster are captured in a new book, Rigathi Gachagua and the Politics of Betrayal, published by The Nairobi Law Monthly in January this year.
“By virtue of the presidential action, Cabinet is set to achieve its constitutional full strength, a move that bolsters the administration’s capacity to continue to steer Kenya’s social economic transformation,” Mr Felix Koskei, the head of the public service and secretary to the Cabinet, said in a statement on Wednesday.
To find out how it all started, get a copy of the August 2024 issue of The Nairobi Law Monthly, available at this link.
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