At a recent event, President William Ruto made an important point that being a politician requires a different skill from being a businessperson, and that those skills are not always transferable. He further argued, with reference to a potential candidate in the Mombasa gubernatorial race, that businesspeople should focus on serving Kenyans in their line of trade, rather than always viewing politics as the pinnacle of achievement.
Ruto’s remarks hearkened to an old theme of Kenya’s political economy. Right from the outset after independence, we went through a spirited debate about whether we should merge private sector practice in business with the affairs of the state. In the end, in 1971 the Ndegwa Commission recommended allowing civil servants to engage in private business (which also implied doing business with government).
To be clear, the commission report was not the genesis of mixing public office with private business. That was already the norm, including during the colonial era. What changed after 1971 was that it became officially sanctioned. Now, there are good reasons why in 1971 thinking people might have viewed it permissible for public officials to actively participate in private business.
An often-forgotten detail about the Ndegwa Report is that it was, for the most part, a development planning document. For almost 400 pages, it was concerned with the problem of how to ignite economic dynamism in Kenya.
Indeed, the recommendation allowing officials to dabble in the private sector was principally driven by the need for modernising civil service that was sufficiently plugged into the engine of growth and could, in turn, also catalyse change in the private sector.
In the end, however, the Jomo Kenyatta administration (especially the Attorney General’s office) ignored most of the other recommendations. Civil servants did business with government without even a pretense of ethical constraints. It is only recently that the government shepherded a conflict of interest law that bans public officials from doing business with government. However, it is still unclear how carefully the law will be enforced.
Of course, the Ndegwa Report is not the main reason why businesspeople might want to enter politics, and vice versa. This mostly happens purely as a result of habits core to our political culture.
For a long time, politicians were accorded high status in society, and therefore anyone seeking high status had incentives to become a politician.
Hopefully, this worldview will come to pass. The other reason is that straddling politics and business allows people to make (illicit) money, and protect it.
As a result, lots of people enter politics purely to make money, and many successful businesspeople enter politics to protect their wealth. Which takes us back to the president’s statement.
The fact of the matter is that the lack of specialisation in either field leaves us with mediocre politicians and businesspeople. Therefore, as a country, we could benefit from more specialisation and professionalisation on both fronts.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
