We need governance and rule of law leader

When Reverend Mutava Musyimi, a former MP, once opined that our core infrastructural deficit was moral, not physical, we ignored him in the large. When CJ Emeritus Willy Mutunga once addressed Starehe High School kids on the challenges Kenyans are exposed to by our “vernacular politicians” we refuted it till he further offered that “corruption has its Vision 2030” and “Kenya is a bandit economy”.

How we got here is a political economy tale about the colonialism we inherited and took home. The simple way to understand the resistance to the political (from policy) state that the constitution as our third revolution demands is to accept that we never got past the comfort of the administrative state.

There is a credible theory that the private sector – the driver of our economy – works despite, not because of government. Officialdom runs on Peter Ekeh’s “two publics”; the notion that, unlike the West, public good is not private good.

Because we have a public, or civic, well represented by the painful colonial officialdom of formal institutions which runs in contradiction to the private, or primordial, good of informal institutions as the ties that bind us. To clarify, Ekeh’s was a 1975 view on post-colonial Africa.

Institutions in this sense do not refer to buildings, but Douglas North’s “rules of the game” – culture, values, behaviours, norms, virtues and all other bases for political, social and economic interaction. Economist David Ndii once offered a fascinatingly amusing thought experiment on Ekeh’s “two publics”.

We don’t steal at private weddings or funerals (all monies fully accounted for), but “mali ya umma” government is fair game.

It is the same backdrop to why the unofficial private sector avoids government and its taxes. In transformational Kenya, this raises two opposing questions. First, logically, how do we get to be more formal (public equals private good)?

Second, and less so, how do we start from the informal (primordial creates its own civility and institutions)? By aiming for the first, do we de-contextualise the second?

Then, have we tried to change it? On December 3, 1991, Moi got his KANU delegates to “allow multi-party” (whatever that meant). A week later, Parliament rubbered the moment. Jaramogi’s Ford suggested national renewal. Today, within the dual question above, we have a gazillion more young people.

The year 2022 is the latest episode of hope. Yet, the binary electoral choice is simple at the presidential level. The supposedly “bad” guy with “good, new ideas” versus the purportedly “good” guy with “bad, old ideas”. Aside from the omnipotent and omnipresent IMF “pound of flesh” reality of fiscal crisis consolidation.

Surprisingly, there is a good Kenya that our prospective leaders do not get. Business Daily’s 2021 list of Top 40 under 40 brilliant young men and women is neither, to be fair, “Hustler” nor “Azimio”. It’s young people getting ahead. And, by personal observation, pretty much uninterested in our endless political drama.

This is not to say that there is no interest in politics. A bit like the Internet, people, especially young people, prefer content to process in a country unusually obsessed with process over content (please refer to our politics, constitution-making and legislative and judicial decision-making for further details).

I suspect this background takes us to our leadership choices. The supply-side of politics is pretty clear. To run Kenya, one needs three orders of priority. The Presidency first, and a National Assembly majority to push the agenda. County Assembly Members second, to keep governors on the straight and narrow.

Senators as a failsafe, and then Women Reps. Sorry, “kickers and screamers”, this is our power matrix today. It’s the matrix of the two publics that private enterprise and citizens vote in and live with.

The traditional, and done, way to run an African government enterprise of two publics is to control two institutions: National Security and National Treasury. It is unsurprising that our first four national leaders have comprised, in bare essence, three securocrats and one econocrat. Everything else is noisy detail.

This is probably why we created the liberal constitution we have today. Not simply as a narrow legal instruction, but as an amazing policy advisory (think devolution, human rights and integrity chapters).

The idea might have been that Kenya was, after said third revolution, ready to graduate from freedom from fear (national security) and freedom from want (national treasury) 50-year child-like adulthood.

The bigger idea was a personal favourite. Successful national leadership delivers individual prosperity and human progress through the mechanism of peaceful times. But peace isn’t just the absence of war, but the presence of justice that itself is the leverage point between security and rights.

Cutting to the chase, national leadership balances the troika of security, economy (or socio-economy) and governance.

We’ve done the first two, securocrat and econocrat. Might this be the time to find the “governator”? The person who keeps us honest, then gets out of the way? I suspect this might be what our youth majority seek; a leader who gets safety ropes, not nets. Governance and Rule of Law Leader loading…?