Imagine Kenya without government

South Sudan is a mess, largely, due to lack of unity and the astonishing corruption at the centre of government. But there are places in the world where the lack of a government doesn’t automatically make the country chaotic.

Robust

With well-run State institutions, a robust and keenly aware judiciary and an impartial civil service generally mean lack of executive arm of government doesn’t need to translate into Somalia-style chaos.

Belgium has a bit of a record in these matters. Belgium was cobbled together in 1830 from diverse nationalities. Today Belgium is composed, largely, of two warring ethnicities: French-speaking Wallonia to the south of the country and Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north. One of Europe’s enduring truths is that most Teutons, the Germanic ethnic groups of northern Europe who include the Dutch, know how to run governments and economies.

Rubbish

While most of the Latin ethnic groups who make up the south of Europe are rubbish at financial management, and are quite corrupt. Extreme cases of these are the stark differences in the way the likes of Norway, Sweden and Germany are run, as compared to how France, Italy and Spain are run. As a result, the European Euro crisis has generally seen the extravagant and poorly managed south of Europe broke, and in hock to the thrifty, well run north.

This division comes to a head in Belgium, which is roughly divided in the middle between Latins and Teutons, neither group of which has the numbers to form a government without a coalition with the other. The result? 535 days without a government, culminating in a negotiated coalition in December 2011. But Belgium still functioned during that government-less period, illustrating perfectly the wisdom that the man on the streets in Nairobi will give you for free: give us strong, working institutions, and we don’t need governments!