Presidential aspirants grilled in second debate

By Wangui Gichuru

The second and final Kenyan  presidential debate scheduled before the general  elections was held at the Brookhouse International School , Monday night, in a steamed up three hour session.

All eight presidential candidates were present including the Jubilee flag bearer, Uhuru Kenyatta, who had earlier on withdrawn from the debate citing unfairness on his part in the first debate held on 11th February.

Among the issues tackled were Land, corruption, economy, resources and resource management. The moderators for the debate were KTN’s Joe Ageyo and Citizen TV’s Uduak Amimo and it wasn’t long before the contenders went all bare knuckled on each other when the corruption issue was being handled. They had to sufficiently explain their role in scandals they have been mentioned in including Anglo-leasing, Goldenberg, the molasses plant and even the maize scandal.

The presidential aspirants were caught in a hard place trying to save face. The Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi strenuously denied any links to Goldenberg, one of the country’s most audacious scandals where payments were made to shadowy figures for fictitious gold exports, this in a country without any significant gold deposits.

He had been exonerated by several investigators, he said, including parliament and a public commission of inquiry, and he insisted that he had actually stopped further payments from being made.

The Prime Minister Raila Odinga, was also at pains to explain what went wrong with a plan to provide jobs for the youth but which ended up being a disastrous loss of public cash. “We learnt several lessons from this,” was the response he gave.

When the much-anticipated section on land reforms came up, Mr. Kenyatta’s turn to be on the spotlight had eventually come. His family is said to be one of the biggest land owners in Kenya and he was asked to explain how that land was acquired to which he confidently answered that all their land had been gotten on the basis of willing buyer -willing seller.

When repeatedly pressed to put a number on the overall acreage, the clearly discomfited candidate at first evaded the question, but it was his rather offhand admission that his family owns 30,000 acres in a single county, Taita Taveta – and one that for decades has been bedeviled by an acute problem of squatters – that had Kenyans incredulous. A tract that size is roughly a third of Seychelles, Africa’s smallest country.

All in all, this was the a step to the right direction seeing that all the contenders in their final statement preached peace and urged  Kenyans to go out and vote come 4th March.

This is the first election that will be held under the 210 constitution.

First published in February 2013.