Two Encounters

Also published in the Business Daily on January 28, 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Lessons-for-county-chief-executives/-/539548/2162566/-/13h75hz/-/index.html

Last week, I had two interesting encounters that were rather eye-opening. The first was with a set of government leaders who perhaps have the hardest task in this country. The second one was with an intellectual superstar. While the two meetings, nominally, had nothing to do with each other, they got me thinking, and led me to a series of profound insights.

The first meeting was the Governors Summit, which took place in Naivasha at the beginning of the week. The conference brought together most of the county chief executives (there are a few who didn’t make it, including two of the more interesting ones, Machakos’s Alfred Mutua and Josephat Nanok of Turkana) to discuss mostly economic issues. The star of the show was President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who held forth for almost three hours, effortlessly fielding questions about everything from his legacy, to issues of tea marketing, to governance.

It is quite interesting sitting in a roomful of Kenya’s governors. The first thought that strikes you is just how many they are. The fact that there are more than forty governors in a country like Kenya means that, in a room such as that and in the public mind, it is quite easy to become anonymous. There will still be some star governors (those who, in previous careers, were well-known; or those who have mastered the dark arts of public relations), but a significant majority are people whom you’ll pass during a tea break without a glimpse of recognition. Which, to my mind, presents both a quandary and an opportunity.

With the clamour for investment and job creation coming from constituents, governors are having to metaphorically shout themselves hoarse to be heard by investors and the national government. The shouting takes many forms. Rare is the week when you do not hear of a county delegation jetting off to some far-off locale in the ostensible search for investors. Deals are even announced, although, for many, the time between the announcement and the actual ground-breaking for an investment is uncomfortably long.

Speak to local investors and the picture becomes even more interesting. I had a chat with a gentleman whose company has national ambitions. His dilemma is one you’ll hear voiced by many of his counterparts – he obviously cannot put up offices in every single county that would like investment, but he cannot, at the same time, be seen to be playing favourites when it comes to his investment decisions.

This leaves governors scrambling to, in effect, take part in beauty contests in the attempt to show their (counties’) best faces to these investors. At this stage of county development, it is still unclear on what structures are in place for adjudicating these beauty contests, to ensure that the needs of the counties and of the investors are both served.

The second encounter was with Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Stanford University. That title, though, does not do justice to how important he looms in the intellectual firmament. He’s most famous for a book he wrote in 1992, proclaiming (to put it simplistically), the end of history. The title was taken from Marxist theory, which said that Communism represented the final stage of historical development. His argument was that the other side had won, and that democratic capitalism represented the culmination of sociopolitical development. He remains slightly peeved at how his argument has been boiled down to a pithy (and slightly wrongheaded) catchphrase, but he still sticks to his reasoning.

He has written a new book, though, which looks at the development of political societies. The first volume of ‘The Origins of Political Order’ came out a couple of years ago, and the second one (with a significant emphasis on Africa) is due this October. I interviewed him, and later moderated a public lecture he delivered at the Strathmore Business School.

His lessons swing back to the governors I had encountered earlier in the week. The one that stuck was about the need for the rule of law, which he defined as a situation where the rules are binding on the most powerful members of that society. Our politicians (and some corporate leaders) have not been known to enjoy legal limits, especially when these get in the way of constraining bad behaviour. Which is why we had, for a while, the clamour for governors to have flags, sirens and chase cars, so that they could excuse themselves from normal traffic rules. There was even a story a fortnight ago of county commissioners who insisted that their very status necessitated their breaking of traffic laws. Or, to put it more sharply, they are too important to be bothered with mere rules.

As the counties, and their leaders, continue to grope through the murk of what is a new experience to everyone, my two encounters contain lessons that they may be well advised to hold on to.