By GITAU WARIGI

It is totally pointless to reshuffle a Cabinet and fail to make heads roll for the starvation millions in the country are facing.

Chiding ministers for speaking out of turn and making them write apology letters when the persons responsible for this food emergency remain seated in that same Cabinet does not make the problem go away.

YOUR WORRY SHOULD NOT BE THAT ministers are making all manner of accusations. Your main concern, rather, should be what illegality some have been engaging in behind your back.

The obvious message communicated from the Thursday Cabinet meeting is that the government’s priority concern is to keep Cabinet disagreements under wraps so that the dirty linen does not get exposed.

Dealing with those behind the scandalous wheeler-dealing in maize and other things can wait.

I have a very angry problem with the reasoning that to manage the Grand Coalition in such a way that it doesn’t blow up requires turning a blind eye to criminality of the worst sort.

Some people scam the maize from our strategic reserve. The country now faces starvation. But since we don’t want to rock the boat, we gloss over the thievery and move on. Too bad some people will die of hunger. It’s called collateral damage.

I BURST OUT LAUGHING WHEN I heard the President and his Cabinet went begging before foreign ambassadors for food aid. The comedy was not about the expensive motorcades the press got hysterical about.

The comedy was about the President apologetically admitting there were rogues in his government as he pleaded for alms.

And the top ones were sitting right there with him.

Only he cannot see the irony of begging when the thieves responsible for the situation remain well ensconced in the system.

How can you honestly expect somebody to help you when you are still hosting in your house the thief who stole your food?

If I was in the donors’ position, why should I listen when you show no inclination or competence for executive house-cleaning?

On Wednesday, the Internal Security minister told the nation that the culprits ? who he admitted included MPs ? would appear in court this week.

I HAVE NOT SEEN ANY SO ARRAIGNED and I am not in the slightest bit surprised. The President is blissfully glum, as is his habit. He shows no care in the world except for the tit-tat between ministers which annoys him so much.

If he knows there are rogues within, only God knows why he doesn’t act against them as the country begins to starve. And we are expected to endure four more years of this aimless, crisis-to-crisis drift?

Last week in Parliament, the minister for Agriculture tabled with some fanfare a list of 3,000 entities who bought maize from the National Cereals and Produce Board in the recent past.

The list is undergoing scrutiny and the results of this are to be known on Wednesday. Before that is done, no one can say with certainty whether these buyers are legitimate, or if they are even millers.

Any street huckster knows the first thing to do is to register a dummy company whenever he or she wants to carry out some shady business deal with a parastatal.

UNLESS HE IS INCURABLY DAFT, HIS name doesn’t have to appear anywhere in the registration document.

Normally, NCPB releases maize only to millers. The question Parliament must ask as it verifies the particulars of the 3,000 buyers is what milling capacity each and every one of them has compared to the size of the maize quota they were allocated.

Their capacity in distribution should also be taken into account. In other words, if you operate just a small posho mill in Endebess and you go seeking for 50,000 bags of maize from NCPB, then there is excellent reason for people to smell a rat.

THE USUAL CIVIL SOCIETY “WATCHDOGS” have been strangely silent as what is a largely man-made famine unravels.

Where matters stand, it is totally unacceptable to rationalise the inertia in sacking culprits on the grounds that no one partner in the grand coalition has the power to act unilaterally against the other side.

If the two sides cannot agree on the simple matter of who should take responsibility for the food emergency, then it is surely time to say enough to this hypocritical and parasitic coalition.

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