Sports Cabinet Secretary Ababu Namwamba has asked the recently appointed Principal Secretary Jonathan Mueke to immediately start work because they are already behind schedule.
Namwamba made these remarks during a handover ceremony for the accounting officer at the Kenya National Library Service on Monday, December 5.
Mueke has taken over the State Department for Sports role from Joe Okudo who has served in the capacity since 2019 under former CS Amina Mohamed.
According to Namwamba, his pressure would be alleviated with the arrival of the new principal secretary.
“It has been quite a challenge to jump into this sea on my own, knowing that the outgoing principal secretary was preparing to hand over, as well as the monumental challenges on the table,” Namwamba said.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you hit the ground running literally from today because you barely have any time for honeymooning.” He added.
Moreover, CS Namwamba also encouraged staff to raise the Ministry’s profile by going the extra mile in their assignments. He also noted that he feared being labeled a failure.
“I don’t want my photo image on the front pages of the newspapers as the worst performing Cabinet Secretary,” Namwamba said.
Furthermore, the CS stated that the ministry faces numerous challenges that can only be resolved through teamwork.
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“There has been a lot of crises across the ministry. In the last 30 days that I’ve been here, we have had to deal with Fifa’s ban on football, doping issues with World Athletics, resolved rugby crisis and we are grappling with other challenges in swimming and badminton,” he said.
Likewise, the sports CS urged the staff to work with the limited financial resources, asking them to suspend certain programs that are not critical and to prioritize the ones that are urgent and immediate.
“You are aware that this is a ministry that has not been resourced very well in terms of budgetary allocation from the Treasury and so we are going to be very frugal, very prudent on how we utilize the limited resources that are available to us,” he said.
Nonetheless, Mueke noted that they will work with stakeholders to achieve their specific targets.
“We are here to do one job which is to ensure that we build this country together. We’ll be partnering a lot with several organizations and institutions. We have many stakeholders so we will have to do stakeholder management,” Mueke said.
