The appointment of Joy Mdivo-Masinde to chair the board of Kenya Power adds fuel to the ongoing perceived onslaught on sympathisers of the regime of former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Ms Mdivo replaced Vivienne Yeda in December last year after the latter’s two years at the helm of the public utility.
Ms Yeda had been appointed in 2020 by President Uhuru Kenyatta to steer the public entity at a time it was steeped in corruption scandals, loss-making, inefficiencies and boardroom wars.
Insiders at the energy company say Ms Yeda quit after the Treasury, which has more than 51 per cent voting rights, chose not to support her reelection during the firm’s annual general meeting (AGM) in December last year.
Her position at Kenya Power was said to cause unease within the Ruto administration, owing to her closeness to some of the top government officials in Uhuru’s State House.
Ms Yeda becomes the latest senior public official to leave her post and be replaced by an ally of President Ruto.
Ms Mdivo was a member of William Ruto’s election campaign team, having served in the Dispute Resolution Committee of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) party that Dr Ruto used to clinch power.
She has had a successful career as a lawyer and was once a council member of the Law Society of Kenya.
For 10 years, she has been the executive director of the East Africa Centre for Law and Justice (EACLJ). For more than two decades, Ms Mdivo has worked in civil society, agitating for various causes.
She sits on various boards in the country, including at the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya.
Ms Mdivo is taking over at a time the government is withdrawing the energy subsidy that lasted for one year before its expiry on New Year’s eve.
The International Monetary Fund had warned the government that the 15 per cent subsidy was affecting Kenya Power’s liquidity ratio, asking it to be suspended.
Now the withdrawal will see Kenyans slapped with higher power tariffs amid a rising cost of living.
A mother of three children, she describes her life as “a colourful tapestry” as a “prolific” human rights advocate, an “astute” political commentator and a church lay leader. “I love it.”
Many Kenyans may not know her, but she has not been exactly anonymous. The political commentator and activist has been vocal about governance issues in the country for many years.
Eulogising the late Nobel laureate Wangari Mathai in 2011, for instance, Ms Mdivo wondered what would have happened if Kenya had given her the chance to run the country.
“If she was our Commander in Chief, would we have had the maize scandal? The arguments about GMO? The Free Primary School Education scandal? Would it have been business as usual for Kenya Pipeline, Kenya Power and others who endanger people’s lives every day?”
Today, she is an advocate of genetically modified foods, saying in November last year: “We have been consuming and cultivating GMO for decades... GMOs are here to stay.”
She notes that the subject is beyond food security. “It is a question of national security.”
Even more strikingly, she is now chairing the board of one of the entities she criticised about a decade ago.
Ten years ago, she described the recruitment of the first Supreme Court judges as a “comedy of horrors” and the interviews as “Gestapo interrogations.”
Ms Mdivo criticised the settlement of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) on Dr Willy Mutunga to head the apex court. “All for what? To end up with a Chief Justice who wears a single stud on his left ear, and says if he has to remove it for him to be Chief Justice, well we can keep the job because that stud is too important to him?”
But Mutunga was not the only judge of the Supreme Court she demonised at the time. She has dismissed Justice Njoki Ndungu as an activist “who has never practised law in the court corridors” while calling current CJ Martha Koome a “former FIDA Kenya stalwart.”
One of Ms Mdivo’s most audacious claims as an activist, though, has been that Kenyans have themselves to blame for bad political choices for “barking up the wrong tree” in elections.
“The country is in the quagmire it is… because the same old names keep being recycled in [parliament] and in State House… Time has come for us to look at the alternatives,” she has argued before.
Ironically, in the last election, Ms Mdivo was in the UDA camp to support Dr Ruto, a career politician.
She is a Christian and has described religion as the “ultimate crutch.”
On her worth, she says: “I have a job that satisfies me, making decent money, living in a nice enough house for what I need, in a good enough neighbourhood for my station in life. I have material blessings.”
Ms Mdivo went to Precious Blood Secondary School and later studied law at the University of Nairobi. She has a masters in organisational leadership from the International Leadership University, Nairobi.
She is the owner of Masinde Mdivo Advocates, a medium-sized law firm she started in 2016 that brings together advocates, legal consultants, and paralegals to provide legal services to personal, corporate and commercial clients.
In December last year, she was appointed as one of the joint secretaries, alongside Omwanza Ombati and Rosemary Kamau, in the task force headed by former Chief Justice David Maraga to look at police reforms.
Whether it will be “business as usual” under her watch at Kenya Power remains to be seen.
