A banana tree has a root that resembles an arrowroot. Unlike the arrowroot, this part is not edible. However, my ancestors would boil this part known as kienja during famine. They too knew it was not edible but boiled it anyway in the same pots used to boil edible tubers. The Kienja was boiled from morning to evening.

No, it wasn’t some ritual to bring rain or to magically fill the empty bellies. It was a clever way to quiet the cries of starving children. The hope of a boiling pot kept them quiet but eager. When the kids became anxious when the cooking went past the serving time for lunch, they would be told that the food had taken longer than usual but would eventually be ready. By evening, exhausted by starvation and the waiting, they fell asleep. The Kienja had achieved its purpose for the day. If a morsel was not found, this trick was repeated successfully the following day, as the sleepy kids didn’t remember if they had eaten or not.

When President Ruto nominates the same people he fired on severe grounds including lack of transparency, he is boiling a Kienja. He knows that these nominations will be contested in courts at the earliest opportunity. He has therefore deliberately thrown fodder for unending discussions about merits and demerits of futility. In the end, he will have achieved much by taking our attention from other equally important issues and decisions of the day. This is political deception of Kienja proportion.

This confounding act also would mean that the President has confused the agitation for a starling noise. That is, what he thought was a lion has turned out to be a brown harmless gazelle. While initially he may have been moved by a reawakening fear to listen to Gen Z in X Spaces, to him, this has turned out to be an act of simply opening the pressure valve to cool things down. Another Kienja boiling moment. Misreading the times, he has judged that this is a passing cloud meteorologists confused for a hurricane.

By nominating in batches the group that will steer this country to prosperity or death, he is simply probing the temperature. In these batches, we will lose sight of the present as the anticipation of what is yet to be is more rewarding. A well choreographed suspense movie produced in State House I tell you.

In my previous article, I have asserted that he fired the entire Cabinet to start his courtship with the Tribeless Gen Z. In re-appointing them, he’s first and foremost trying to exhaust We The People as we attempt to decipher the confounding judgment of a man who fires and hires the same people. Why would a man eat what he’s vomited? This is Kienja boiling.

This new and shocking phenomenon of hiring the fired deserves more attention. Let’s think of a man with failed kidneys. He goes to Dr. Ruto, a specialized renal doctor, who agrees that the man will only survive if he gets kidney transplant. Dr. Ruto is the surgeon who puts the man under the knife and removes the failed kidneys. Upon waking up from anesthesia, the man is shocked to learn that he was transplanted with his own failed kidneys. This shock reverberates in the entire medical world while the general public is forever flabbergasted. How now! they all ask?

Yes, Dr. Ruto surgically removed the kidneys he himself declared as failed and sutured them right back pronouncing the procedure as a total success. This my fellow citizens is what President Ruto is doing by re-nominating people he himself fired for having utterly failed. If we go along, we are desperately gullible. We will need to change our country’s name from Kenya to Gullible Kingdom. Was the blood brutally shed on the street by our children for nothing? It’s our eternal vigilance which will stop the political class (government and opposition) from thinking that this push back by Gen Z is just another passing cloud.

I further submit, by the same confounding act of eating what’s vomited, he is equally trying to weigh the strength of ‘mtu wetu’ politics versus the Tribeless Gen Z. Fierce voices will emerge to defend re-nominated ‘mtu wetus’ while another choir will be singing Gen Z’s representative nominees tunes. In the end, only one choir will win this contest. This is not necessarily a boiling Kienja but a political barometer to determine which way he will invest for 2027. That is, does he invest in the tribeless Gen Z or the same old tribal alliances? Don’t forget, tribal alliance is the political calculus that informed his choice of cabinet now failed. Again, the answer he seeks from the vomitus; is the Tribeless dawn really here or are these the same meteorologists who predicted a hurricane that to him turned out to be a precipitate dust-devil?

Finally, new Cabinet nominations will be littered with characters whose qualifications will be shot down quickly by simple online searches to make Gen Z feel as if they participated in the vetting. By letting the nominee go even perhaps before getting to Parliament for a vetting that I have argued is not representative, Gen Z will be told that their voices have been heard. This is a presentation of obvious low hanging fruits for rejection so as to exhaust our energy to question the next level of reject-able nominees. This too is a boiling Kienja but one that doesn’t show seriousness on the president’s part. This will be additional evidence that he’s has utterly misjudged the times.

We don’t need a boiling Kienja, we need our chief cook to deliver the food we employed him to cook. In the same vein, we will not a accept Kenya to be transplanted with failed kidneys!

Written by Robert Mwangi, MBA
Author of President’s Advisor,
Money Circles, Five Fingers
& Dollar Altar. He also composed Ziba Ufa and Bururi Mwonju.
www.FiveFingersNow.com