Covid-19 shows some governors can work

Many Kenyans have been surprised by the sight of mission-driven governors at work in the fight against Covid-19. In Mombasa, Governor Joho (pictured) has stepped up to avoid a catastrophe in the city. Kitui’s Charity Ngilu moved fast to repurpose the county’s textiles capacity to make essential items like masks. Even the embattled Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru has been out ensuring that markets can still operate in her county while adhering to the official guidelines about social distancing.

While it is tempting to be cynical about these developments, we should also sit back and think about why it took a global pandemic for these governors to step up, and how we might build on their efforts moving forward. Also, it is worth noting that some governors, like Kitui’s Ngilu, Makueni’s Kivutha Kibwana, Vihiga’s Wilberforce Otichilo, Kakamega’s Wycliffe Oparanya, and Uasin Gishu’s Jackson Mandago had been doing a better-than-average job even before the pandemic hit.

The driving motivation for the behavior change among our governors is simple: attribution. Students of electoral politics have long noted that elected officials have incentives to focus their efforts on tasks which are easily observable and attributable (to their efforts). To enhance attribution, the Covid-19 pandemic has done two important things. First, it has concentrated voters’ minds on very simple measures of performance – the number of positive cases identified and deaths. Second, it has given everyone (voters and elected officials alike) a clear metric of relative performance. For example, it is trivially easy to know that South Korea did a better job of preparing for and handling the crisis than either Spain or the United Kingdom. Both these factors make it fairly easy for voters to lay blame on poor performance on the relevant authorities. Sensing this, some governors have stepped up their game.

To reinforce the ease of attribution, it helps that responding to this public health emergency requires input from medical professionals. This leaves little room for politicians to hoodwink voters with sideshows (the antics of the Nairobi governor notwithstanding). Finally, the lack of incessant mindless podium-dancing at political rallies has also provided a lot of room of elected official to focus on their day job – which is to provide public services. Moving forward, we should ask ourselves two questions. How do we sharpen the measurement of governors’ performance? And how can we ensure that our public life is filled with reasoned debates about policy and a healthy respect of real expertise, as opposed to constant politicking?

Humans, including our governors, respond to incentives. We are learning that some of our governors are fairly capable of doing a good job if we strengthen channels of attribution, increase the role of experts in policymaking and implementation, and stop the habit of incessant politicking. One thing that we can do to keep governors on their toes is to develop sectoral league tables of county-level performance. Such tables can focus on objective rankings of counties’ performance in key sectors with each sector discussed in a given quarter by the Senate and disseminated in local media and at public participation forums. This would likely lead to significant social learning about what devolution ought to be about, and empower citizens to evaluate their governors on the basis of performance.

- The writer is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University