Details of leaked PLO Lumumba's letter to President Ruto on issues plaguing Kenya

A confidential lamentation letter to President William Ruto has called on him to take action on 11 key issues affecting the country and making life unbearable for the majority of Kenyans.

The letter authored by Lawyer Patrick Lumumba and titled “Cry, my beloved Country” notes that being a Kenyan is gradually becoming unbearable due to the many issues affecting everyday living.

“The pain of being a Kenyan is slowly becoming unbearable. A country where pensioners' money is stolen and your government is quiet. A country where workers' wages are deducted and yet not remitted to SACCOs and banks, but we are quiet,” he notes.

The letter dated September 25 then goes on to list recent issues that are affecting citizens including recent abductions, students going for weeks without learning, opposition merging with the government to satisfy personal interests, rising accident numbers, budgeted corruption, the JKIA-Adani deal, plunder of public resources and death of children via school infernos.

Others listed include; bribery for government positions, corruption in church, tribalism, and police brutality.

“This is an ailing nation with ailing people who have no qualms about voting in corrupt leaders and the plunder of state resources, the degradation of our public institutions, and have little regard for our future or that of our offspring. Who bewitched Kenyans?” the lawyer poses.

In the letter addressed to President Ruto, Lumumba further asks when Kenyans will “grow up, become brave, and stop being subservient to bad leadership.”

He goes on to call on the president to act on rebuilding public trust, re-examine the tax regime, and attune it to the country’s reality, tame impunity witnessed through disobedience to court orders and police intolerance witnessed with the arbitrary arrests on young Kenyans seeking a change in governance.

He further urges President Ruto to address the crisis in the education sector brought about by the lingering issues in implementing the competency-based curriculum and the new University Funding Model.

Calls for deeper consultations in the shift from the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) to the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF), a look into the plight of teachers and their working conditions, regulation of the banking sector, ethnic mobilisation, and wastage in the government, check the growing appetite for privatisation of public assets which he warns has caused much anger amongst the populace.

Proposes a review of certain areas of the constitution that do not serve personal interests but the common good of Kenyans such as devolution.

“The country should have a national conversation on whether counties ought to be merged as a way of making them more effective by liberating them from perennial financial woes and emergent nepotism, clanisation, corruption, wastage, and ethnicisation in some to the detriment of the national good.”

On the same note, he calls for the president to check the cause of the unconstitutionality of the government’s major initiatives, noting that it is a pointer to a lack of quality legal scrutiny.

“Your excellency, as you ruminate over the issues I have raised, I beseech you to listen to your well-meaning critics who patriotically muster the courage to speak out via various media without fear of consequences; their messages may be annoying, even irritating, but they mean well for you and our Motherland-Kenya,” he concludes.