The boy who scored six distinctions in my Form Four class proceeded to Alliance High School and then to the University of Nairobi for a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. Today, he is a senior official in the Ministry of Planning. My assessment is that he takes home less than Sh80,000 a month.
But we had this chap who dropped out of school in third form and started selling hides and skins. By the time the genius in our class was negotiating through his first year at the university, the hides and skins boy was already a millionaire.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day, I would wake up to discover the hides and skins man in Parliament. He, after all, has the money to mount a successful political campaign. It wouldn’t surprise me, either, if he were appointed minister in charge of Planning to lord it over that miserable intellectual of a classmate who scored six straight distinctions at school.
I have been mulling over this as I watch Barack Obama cobble his cabinet team together. He has women in there, a Japanese-American, a bunch of blacks, a Hispanic (before Governor Bill Richardson stepped down) and every intellectual he could lay his hands on.
Best brains
He didn’t stick to his party but raided the opposition for the best brains he could find. When he is sworn in, his government will be led by some of the best talent in America.
The contrast happens in Kenya where the tail wags the dog. We recruit highly qualified Permanent Secretaries, most of them academics at the top of the ladder in their areas of expertise. Then we insult them by appointing people with laughable intellectual and managerial abilities to lead them.
And even when we have qualified ministers, we still give them deputies as wooly-headed as the chap who made a career out of chewing miraa
in his car at the Parliament buildings’ parking lot.
Our best brains don’t have the stomach for politics — they are in commerce and industry, academia and the NGO world. Can’t we, like Obama, select the men and women of merit and allow them to run government while politicians politic? Why do we pretend that the boring speech readers with little flags on their cars run ministries when everyone knows that it is the Permanent Secretaries who run the show?
