If you thought the “Broad-based Government” was going to bring fresh faces and revolutionary ideas to our crumbling institutions, you’ve clearly been drinking the State House Kool-Aid. The latest Gazette Notice dated February 13, 2026, is nothing more than a high-stakes game of musical chairs where the music never stops and nobody actually leaves the room. President Ruto and his band of Cabinet Secretaries have spent the week rewarding loyalty and recycling the same old names into the same old seats. It’s the Kenyan way: why hire a professional when you can re-appoint a political ally?

Take Ugas Mohamed at the Capital Markets Authority or Sally Njambi Mahihu at KenInvest. Their tenures have been extended like a bad soap opera that refuses to reach the finale. These are the people supposedly “regulating” our markets and “facilitating” investment while the shilling dances a tango with disaster. Re-appointing them for another three years isn’t about stability; it’s about making sure the gatekeepers of the nation’s wealth are people who already know whose hands to shake and whose calls to ignore.

The irony of seeing John Mbadi and Wycliffe Oparanya - men who once screamed about government excesses from the rooftops - now signing off on these re-appointments is not lost on us. Mbadi is busy populating the CMA board with five “new” old faces, while Oparanya is keeping Jack Ranguma comfortable at SASRA. It seems the “opposition” didn’t come to change the system; they just came to share the pen. It’s a classic case of Cassypool’s Samia Suluhu Matatu, Bootlicking or Cultural Betrayal?, where the art of the suck-up has become the only requirement for job security in this administration.

Even the milk we drink isn’t safe from the patronage machine. Mutahi Kagwe, now playing the role of Agriculture CS, has re-appointed Genesio Mugo and a whole village of board members to the Kenya Dairy Board. Because apparently, in a country of 50 million people, we can’t find anyone else who understands cows and cream. From tourism to Saccos, the message is clear: if you are in the circle, you stay in the circle. The rest of us can continue reading the Gazette as if it were a list of people we are subsidizing with our disappearing taxes.

This 2026 spree is a calculated move. With 2027 looming on the horizon like a dark cloud over the Ngong Hills, the government is busy securing its “fixers” in key regulatory bodies. They are ensuring that every sector - from the Nairobi Securities Exchange to the grassroots affirmative action funds - is managed by someone who owes their seat to the current regime. It’s not about service delivery; it’s about campaign logistics.

So, as you struggle to pay for your K-12 school fees or watch your small business get strangled by new “facilitation” fees, remember that the elite are doing just fine. They don’t need to innovate or perform; they just need to wait for the next Gazette notice to drop. The more things change in Nairobi, the more they stay exactly the same for those at the top of the food chain. The “Hustler” narrative died a long time ago; we’re just watching the burial ceremony in slow motion.