The last couple of months cannot have been
easy ones for the President. Uhuru Kenyatta has watched his government sail
into some pretty heavy weather, with the economic seas becoming so rough that
the sails have threatened to come right off his carefully crafted plans. The
ironic thing is that the crisis of the past few months has hit directly at the
three elements of the government’s image that it was supposed to be in full
control of. Call it economic judo – when
your very strengths are what turn against you.
President Kenyatta’s public profile has
until now been composed of three interlinked elements: first, he has carefully
constructed an image of super competence, with an assist from the constitution
that meant that his senior management team – the cabinet – was unsullied by the
demands of dirty politics. An American-style administration, with a State
House-based Presidential team, was supposed to have selected the best minds in
the country, with the appeal of working for the government supposed to draw the
best and the brightest away from the private sector. The idea was to blow away
the mustiness of decades of rule by tired old men.
The second element was economic management.
Here was a President who had come almost directly from a perch as Finance
Minister. His Chief of Staff was one of the most respected mandarins of
Harambee Avenue, and the Treasury and Central Bank were manned by some of the
savviest public economic managers around.
The third was communication. The teams of
young, savvy, supremely confident technocrats were equipped, and empowered; to
be ready to act and react to almost any message that required their skills. The
2013 campaign was supposed to have permanently changed the profession of
political imaging in Kenya. The first months of the Presidency, with carefully
shaped images of a working young president were shared on traditional and new
media, and a mix of policy pronouncements and ease in power were meant to re-make
the Presidency into a 21st-century ready one.
These three elements have been the exact
same ones that have been so tarnished in the turmoil of 2015. Major policy and
strategy missteps have brought doubts about the competence of these hitherto
best minds in the government. The cash crisis of the past few weeks, if you
speak to financial types, have mostly been about poor cashflow management, and
bad debt planning. The banker and Business Daily columnist, Mohamed Wehliye, put
it best: if these were treasurers in a commercial bank, they would have lost
their jobs by now.
Claims of economic management prowess ring
a bit hollow when all the objective indicators, as well as the subjective ones,
are pointing south. Sky-high interest rates and the hollow sense of an economy
adrift are a bad combination for a country supposed to be built on the
entrepreneurial instincts of its people.
Finally, much of the despondency about the
economic picture is simply a matter of ineffectual communication. Objectively
speaking, the Kenya shilling was not doing that badly, especially compared to peer
currencies. You would not have known that, however, if you looked at the
panicked response by the Central Bank and other policymakers. Communication
about the teachers’ strike, the cost of infrastructure, the Eurobond and
government cash management has been characterised either by sullen silence,
denial (even in the face of contradictory evidence) and then a rush to
overwhelm with facts, figures and graphs.
The positive thing (and the application of
anti-judo) is that there are signs of a turnaround. The best skills in
government are now being deployed to the right places (multiple sources have
told me that management at the Treasury is now an all-hands-on-deck affair,
with senior government officials with international banking experience tasked
with daily oversight of Treasury affairs).
Communication is still not up to scratch,
but one can detect a shift away from the overly-defensive nature of the
messaging, to an acknowledgement that there has been a problem that is now
hopefully being resolved. However, the competence question can only be answered
by an improvement in economic fortunes – when both the objective numbers and
citizen sentiment both align in a positive direction.
While no crisis is welcome, for President
Kenyatta, this economic storm may have come at the right moment. Far enough
into his Presidency for him to own, but distant enough from the next election
for him to execute the perfect economic jujitsu and get the ship of state back
into calm, progressive waters.
Also published in the Daily Nation on 3 November 2015
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