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President William Ruto’s “broad-based government” that was sworn in last week must hit the ground running.

 The President was forced to disband his Cabinet following deadly protests by young people speaking truth to power and demanding clean government, low taxes, access to essential documents, decent jobs at home and education loans.

Some were shot dead while holding the flag of a country they were brought up to love. Comrades sang the solemn words of the national anthem during their funerals.

The people who secured places in the Cabinet have no time to celebrate because they found themselves in government under very painful circumstances.

The young people spoke against an insensitive display of opulence by half-educated politicians who mock good education, merit and hard work. We hope those who have been tasked to sit on the country’s top decision-making organ have learnt their lessons.

It will, however, be noted that when some of the Cabinet nominees appeared before the vetting team, they blamed their blemishes on principal secretaries.

 Most of them stuck to the refrain that the role of Cabinet secretaries is policy guidance. They said that the execution of ministry mandates lay with the bureaucrats.

Principal secretaries are the drivers of success or feeders of ineptitude in ministries. They are the accounting officers and top public servants in their dockets. It is time for them to own their skunk.

That is why we encourage President Ruto to cascade his reorganisation of government to weed out incompetent and corrupt principal secretaries. It has been apparent from their public pronouncements and decisions that some PSs are out of their depth and lack the talent, skills and intellectual

stamina to run their dockets. A number of them sound like misplaced and bewildered ghosts in the offices they occupy. This is because some of them were politicians or campaigners for the Kenya Kwanza administration.

The consequence of this is impunity guided by an unfortunate attitude that the President owes them. Ruto must free himself from the chains of this blackmail that does not serve the public interest.

This terrible mindset has rationalised and incentivised mediocrity at the expense of meritocracy in the public service. It has a history in the thinking of a certain cadre of government workers that joining the public service is an opportunity to accumulate wealth through the theft of public coffers that is flaunted as an enterprise.

We also ask the President to extend his crackdown to his advisers and parastatal chiefs who have run down institutions.