Excuses tarnish the image of a leader

But that is political leadership, what about business leadership?

A few weeks ago, the Strathmore Business School held a well-attended forum for sustaining economic development through real estate.

The key note speaker was Mr Philip Kisia, the Town Clerk of Nairobi City Council.

Mr. Kisia, prior to that day, had an illustrious career as the CEO of the Nairobi Central Business District Association (NCBDA) and then the CEO of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre.

The latter role did wonders for his image, as what was reflected was the utter transformation of a dilapidated and barely functioning city skyscraper into a modern and professionally run conference facility.

When Mr Kisia took the podium, that image may as well have been reflected on a stagnant pool of water as it quickly evaporated.

He blamed virtually every ill that bedevilled the City Council on the mysterious “You People” as he made reference to the crowd that sat before him.

From flippant statements like “You People are the ones who build in Kiambu not us” to “You people are the ones who give briefcases to town planners” and the best one of which was “You don’t like hawkers, but they are produced by you people.”

Mr Kisia surprised the listeners with his “you people” debate and completely left a large number of participants bewildered as to what transformation had occurred in him within the whitewashed colonial walls of the City Council.

I stopped counting the number of “you people” allegations when he got to ten, by which time his slant had moved to wondering why the corporate bodies represented in the room could not give money to the City Council to improve its Information Technology infrastructure and even banks would not lend to the Council, but in the same breadth he stated that 80 per cent of his revenues go to paying salaries due to his bloated headcount leaving him with very little money to do anything else.

The silver lining in the “dodging-responsibility” cloud came in the form of Mr Kisia’s boss, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government, Mr Sammy Kirui.

Collective responsibility

The soft-spoken but highly knowledgeable PS was conversely effective.

Every sentence began with “We” and he exemplified the notion of collective responsibility of the Government by taking the time to define the role of the Local Government Ministry as well as why some of the initiatives that Mr Kisia had stated as having been put in a cabinet paper required cabinet approval.

Mr Kirui’s effective discourse gave the crowd a far better understanding of his message rather than his opinion.