Jubilee should match PR with quality in public service

By Ken Opalo

twitter@kopalo

In much of life, those who do not do the work they are hired to do get fired. Not so in the Kenyan government. For 50 years we have developed a culture of non-performance in the public service, where instead mediocrity gets handsomely rewarded. Glaring cases of poor judgment, incompetence and grand corruption among public officials are commonplace that we have become numb to them. Preventable accidents like the train crash at Mtindwa on Wednesday or boneheaded acts like the decision by the Kenya National Highway Authority to block Waiyaki Way during rush hour on Tuesday only get our chattering classes animated for a few hours. Public officials then come in with promises of investigations and stern warning against those who dropped the ball. Then we collectively forget and move.

The Uhuru administration came into office with the mantra of professionalism. For a brief moment Kenyans thought the country was on the verge of a total paradigm shift in how the public sector was managed. But this was not to be. The only segment of government that appears to have embraced the new professionalism is the public relations management team at State House – and even there the content of speeches and public announcements could do with a little dusting up. Tech savvy mandarins at State House and a few other public offices have mastered the art of flooding the social media as well as traditional news channels with all manner of pronouncements.

Well publicised and masterfully orchestrated rollouts of ill thought-out public programmes have filled our airwaves over the last few months, only to learn later that not enough planning or consultation was done on the actual programmes.

This is not the way to run a government. It is also bad politics because it unnecessarily raises expectations and sets the public up for disappointment. To put it simply, so far the goods have not matched the salesmanship under the Kenyatta Administration. Something needs to change. But how?

You see, the Kenyan public service is stuck in what economists call a bad equilibrium. To understand why, think of the civil service as a massive assembly line in which how well the person at point B does their work depends not only on their effort but also on the efforts of those at points A and C. If the person at point B knows that the other two do not do their work then he/she will rationally conclude that their own effort will amount to nothing. And so the smart thing to do is to also not put in any effort. The converse is also true. Understood this way, the task of reforming the Kenyan public service does not solely hinge on bringing in new people – although the skillset in some offices needs to be radically improved – but also on providing the right incentives.

This is where leadership comes in. Here we are well served to look at our EAC neighbour Rwanda which this past week hosted Mr Kenyatta and other regional leaders at a conference in Kigali. President Paul Kagame, with a less educated and skilled workforce, has within less than 20 years transformed Rwanda and catapulted it to the top 35 best places to do business in the world. Kenya is ranked 129th. Efficiency and competence are the hallmarks of the Rwandan public service.

What Kagame did was make sure that every public servant knew that they had to do their work well. So instead of being stuck in the non-performance bad equilibrium Rwandan public officials found themselves in the desirable equilibrium of performance and public sector accountability. The lesson here is that we can’t pretend to reform a few sectors of government while reserving other sectors for incompetent and venal cronies and co-ethnics. This is what has led us to the current situation of the absolute triumph of absolute mediocrity.

Our Swahili people have a saying that chema chajiuza, kibaya chajitembeza. The Jubilee Administration appears to have mastered the art of salesmanship but without putting in the same amount of effort in managing the quality of the product being sold. State House should be advised that when communication is not accompanied by substance it becomes mere propaganda. Don’t talk about government programmes or websites that are still figments of someone’s imagination as if they are up and running. Don’t talk about professionalism when mediocrity still goes unpunished and is in fact rewarded. Kenyans deserve better.

 

The writer is a PhD candidate at Stanford University and a partner at IPRE Group