William Ruto, Kenya’s president has sacked members of his cabinet over poor performance and the finance bill protest that led to the death of many Kenyan youths.
The NY Times reported that at the presidential palace in the capital, Nairobi, on Thursday, Ruto defended the performance of his administration since his election in 2022, but said that the electorate expected more from his government.
“I will immediately engage in extensive consultations across different sectors and political formations and other Kenyans, both in public and private, with the aim of setting up a broad-based government,” Ruto said.
Read also: Kenyas Ruto Scraps Budgets for Offices of First Lady, Second Lady, Cuts Advisers by Half Amid Protest
He said that after listening carefully and reviewing his cabinet’s performance, he had decided to fire the cabinet secretaries, whom he had appointed, with immediate effect including the country’s attorney general Ruto said he would retain the foreign minister, Musalia Mudavadi, in the cabinet.
Lists 24 cabinet secretaries in addition to the deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua, who Ruto said would retain his post.
The president said a new cabinet would assist him in the “implementation of radical programs to deal with the burden of debt,” eliminate wasteful government spending and “slay the dragon of corruption.”
Read also: Tear gas fired as Kenya protesters return to streets with new demand.
His decision to fire the cabinet was quickly claimed by protesters as another victory. But it was unclear whether the move would deflect criticism from the president and buy him time, or stoke the demands for further resignations including that of the president himself.
On Thursday, the independent Kenya Human Rights Commission called on Ruto to fire more officers at the ministries and prosecute security chiefs responsible for the killings. The group also urged Ruto to nominate a smaller but gender- and ethnically diverse cabinet.
“I feel so happy about the move that the president made,” Daniel Mwangi, an activist in Nairobi told NY Times who was among the protesters against the finance bill. “We wanted them gone.”
In the Gen Z protests, as they are known in Kenya, people flooded the streets of towns and cities around the country to denounce a finance bill that would have increased taxes on a population already struggling to afford the high cost of living. In Nairobi, some demonstrators even stormed into the Parliament building, smashed windows and set part of it on fire soon after the finance bill was passed.
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