Uhuru Kenyatta’s entire branding is about
being youthful, so it is understandable that we sometimes forget that this is a
man on the far side of fifty. It is a fact that doesn’t often make itself
evident, until it does. The quickest way is when the President puts on a pair
of reading glasses, and then he looks nothing so much as a stern headmaster.
This is especially so when he decides to take charge of a meeting, where he
becomes an interesting combination of a roll-up-your-sleeves CEO and a stern
headmaster.
Last Friday, at State House, the President
was playing that role with gusto, when he chaired his private sector round
table. The regular meetings bring together members of the business community
(helmed by the Kenya Private Sector Alliance), along with the Cabinet
Secretaries in government who are most directly tasked with matters of an
economic nature. This particular roundtable was a special one, and not just
because it was the last one of the year. The organisers decided to broaden the
attendees, and invited members of the development community (what we politely
call donors nowadays), as well as a few business editors (as long as we were
not too noisy and could credibly fit in with the great and good of the business
community, that is).
The meeting was an eye-opening one, in that
it up-ended many assumptions we usually have about the government and its
operations. Since this is one of a series of meetings, the corporate sector had
put together a progress report, a checklist of sorts where the promises made
last time could be compared against actual advances. And it was impossible to
hide behind rhetoric. President Kenyatta called out on the involved cabinet
secretaries to state directly how they had matched up to their deliverables.
Platitudes were not cutting it, and it was interesting to see how some were
getting hot under the collar as the President pushed them to state their
deadlines.
It was all an impressive show (and one that
seemed genuine, by the way, as there were no cameras present apart from those
from the President’s communications team). The frustration about slow delivery
was coming from the very top, and it seemed that the very irritation we have
when the government doesn’t come through is shared by the President and some of
his cabinet members.
It would be facile to say that the
President has all the levers of power at his disposal, and all he would need to
do is give orders for things to change and for inertia to be unstuck. But when
I stood aside with a senior government official, chatting about the atmosphere
of the roundtable and the way things were going, the official gave an inkling
why sometimes things don’t work as advertised within the GoK, and why our frustration
may last a while longer.
Listen, the official told me, we may try
our best – give orders and insist on delivery. But if the civil service decides
to frustrate you, it doesn’t matter how loudly you shout. The official echoed
what has been known by anyone who’s ever tried to change a bureaucracy. It’s
not the public, visible parts of it that matter. It is deep in the bowels of
the organisation that the best laid plans come to naught.
Remember an old BBC series titled ‘Yes
Minister’? It was updated a few years ago, with a new television series named
‘The Thick of It’. It’s a lot more foul mouthed than the old series, but the
premise is the same. Well-meaning, if slightly naïve, cabinet ministers are
stymied by their sharp, scheming underlings, who know that ministers come and
go, but mandarins stay forever (or at least for decades). Two issues are no
coincidence. One, that the most visibly effective cabinet secretaries – Ann
Waiguru, Henry Rotich and Michael Kamau –worked in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy
before they were elevated to the cabinet. The other is that the supposed
‘fixer’ in the Chickengate scandal, Trevor Oyombra, was a low-ranking,
undistinguished paper-pusher in the organisations he worked in.
The effectiveness, many say, is because the
three ministers know exactly which buttons to push, and which doors to unlock,
in order to make things move. Oyombra, on the other hand, was the perfect agent
to not only facilitate the alleged corruption, but to also keep it hidden for
as long as it took to fatten the pockets of the higher-ups concerned.
The private sector operates under somewhat
different rules, of course. It is much easier to sack the ineffective, or the
simply obstructionist, without having to consider the political implications of
the move. Entire divisions can be shuttered when they’re no longer considered crucial
to the overall growth of the enterprise. Even there, however, CEOs still face
the frustration of trying to change the trajectory of the company, and
wondering why a clear strategic direction becomes muddied once communicated to
the troops. Entire volumes have been written about change management, but the
frustration still lingers.
The fact is that, even with the best of
intentions and the absence of the venal, big institutions have a lot of
inertia. Making them shift, and improving delivery to their customers, can take
an exasperatingly long time.
And that is even without the President
glowering at you like a middle-aged headmaster.
Also published in the Business Daily on December 9, 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Slow-service-delivery-pegged-on-tardy-workers/-/539548/2549020/-/item/0/-/xtrtl4/-/index.html
Comments
Post a Comment