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Kenyan president, PM set to declare coalition Cabinet

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and would-be prime minister Raila Odinga were due yesterday to announce a new coalition Cabinet, ending a protracted delay that threatened to erupt into new violence.

Kenyan and diplomatic officials said the pair struck the much-delayed agreement to divide Cabinet posts after Saturday’s talks in Sagana State Lodge in central Kenya.

The Cabinet was scheduled to be unveiled on April 6 but was put off after they failed to agree on a 50-50 sharing of key infrastructural and administrative portfolios.

The new government is a key step in implementing a Feb. 28 power-sharing deal that quelled violence that broke out following Kenya’s disputed December polls, which left at least 1,500 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.

RECENT RIOTS

Last week, riot police battled hundreds of angry youths in the capital’s Kibera slums and the western city of Kisumu protesting over the delay, raising fears of fresh bloodletting in the battered nation.

The riots caused extensive damage, notably the dismantling of the only railway line that links the port of Mombasa to landlocked Uganda and three other central African nations, thereby choking supplies.

Once named, the new line-up will replace the current Cabinet that Kibaki hastily assembled after he was controversially declared re-elected after the Dec. 27 polls.

It was unclear whether they would name a 40-member Cabinet, the size that had been agreed on initially, but is opposed by many Kenyans, notably civil society groups and newspapers.

Independent watchdogs say the average cost of running a ministry in Kenya is around 8 billion shillings (US$130 million) a year, too expensive for a country where 60 percent of its people live on less than US$1 a day.

Odinga, the leader of the Orange Democratic Movement party, is due to become the new prime minister under the power-sharing accord that has been entrenched in the Constitution.

Western powers have piled pressure on the pair to implement the accord, mediated by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, which curbed tribal fighting, revenge killings and police crackdowns that erupted when Odinga accused Kibaki of rigging the polls.

SUPPORT

A new poll released on Saturday showed that 75 percent of Kenyans support the coalition, but 50 percent feared that it would not last a whole five years because of fractious local politics.

The violence, which stripped the country of its reputation as a relatively peaceful haven in the conflict-torn Horn of Africa region, also choked the mainstay tourism and agricultural sectors.

This sent inflation climbing to a record 21.8 percent, mainly because of increased food and fuel prices, prompting the government to scale down this year’s growth forecast for the economy from 8 percent to between 4.5 percent and 6 percent.
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