Kenya Kwanza finding its footing but seems suspicious of opposition

In church last Sunday, the focus was irrigation to deal with hunger. Respect for the rule of law was Monday's topic, as was the financial sector's Sh500 billion Sanduku PPP Initiative for affordable housing, industrial parks and other infrastructure investment.

By Tuesday, attention had turned to the tenant purchase-based social housing delivery part of the affordable housing plan. Part of Tuesday and all of Wednesday was spent on diplomatic engagements, and on Thursday, the "non-fail" Cabinet was sworn in with a missive to respect the Constitution and uphold the rule of law at work.

Now think about the news. Monday led us into first details on the fatal shooting of Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif in foggy circumstances, which has only added to cynicism and concern around what happened to two Indian polling/ICT experts and their Kenyan cab driver.

But we still had space for politics, this time in anticipation of the vetting report on nominated Cabinet Secretaries, which was issued later in the day. From Tuesday to Thursday, we quietly followed updates on the investigations, but kept our eyes and ears firmly fixated on the tweets, twists and turns in the Cabinet appointment melodrama from Parliament to State House. We hear that it cost us at least a Sh10 million rubber stamp to vet Sh16 billion into high office!

How do we have these two narratives for the same brief timeline? Well, the first is a rough extract of what President William Ruto was publicly up to, as captured on State House's Twitter feed. The second is a rough summary of what our mainstream media's print and TV headlines looked like. This is a simple illustration that stops before the further announcements made on Friday.

To be clear, State House does not write the news, and neither is our independent media compelled to religiously follow official Twitter feeds when there are always two sides to any story, as is said. Of course, there is the invisible side to the news: the painful part that reflects much of our lived reality. Death by security or insecurity. Countrywide hunger as the new food insecurity. Unaffordable living costs fast reciprocated by unbearable living standards. A global climate crisis that is hitting every Kenyan life and livelihood. We will return to this invisible part.

Back to the earlier narratives. It is clear that the government is not the press, and the press is not the government. Yet, in a nuance from previous administrations, Kenya today feels like two stories reflecting the polar opposites of Kenya Kwanza's Arctic vs the Antarctica of mainstream media.

Johari's Window

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I think Johari's Window is at work here. Johari's Window is a useful self-awareness tool created in the mid-1950s that guides people to an improved understanding of themselves and others. As an exercise it gets one to work with others towards this self-understanding in four quadrants. First, the "(open) arena" (things I know about myself, and others know about me).

Second, the "blind spot" (things that others know about me, but I don't). Third, the "(hidden) facade" (things I know about myself, but others don't). Fourth, the "unknown" (things that I don't know about myself, and others don't know either). The exercise typically uses a checklist or card deck on which adjectives (qualities) are written, so the unknowns come from items/cards not picked.

The general idea is to improve your self-awareness through sharing/disclosure to others (to remove the facade), invite feedback (to get rid of blind spots) and use this sharing and feedback to pursue a deeper journey to discover your true self. It is a useful experience well worth the effort.

This is not a psycho/socio lecture, but this window offers a way to begin to understand that our Kenya Kwanza administration represents many "known knowns" (the things we know that we know about them) and "known unknowns" (the things we know that we don't know about them).

These descriptions draw from the famous 2002 strategic intelligence briefing by Donald Rumsfield, then US Secretary of Defence, around the time before the US invasion of Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. It was an interesting twist on the logic behind the Johari Window not for self-reflection, but for the sort of defence and intelligence thinking that could preface "action".

Using his famous words, there were also "unknown unknowns" (the things we don't know that we don't know about them) that he feared most. It was a war setting, indeed the war on terror, but one can also view this in a non-war political context, despite the popular saying that politics is war by other means. A couple of European thinkers added the fourth dimension - "unknown knowns" (the things we don't (want to) know that we know) - facade or blind spot depending on your lens.

The simple way to view these dimensions - as these scholars did - is to frame our understanding of our relationship with today's political context in terms of, as they would have put it, "what we know, what we do not know, what we cannot know and what we know but do not like to know". Let's take this perspective to engage in a thought experiment on our current Kenyan moment. This is not a Johari Window on Kenya Kwanza, but a quick and easy-going take on where we are now.

What are the "known knowns"? Ours is that we are living in a difficult economic and social moment, and we are looking for solutions from our leaders today, not tomorrow or next year. Kenya Kwanza seems to accept this, with the fast-emerging proviso that the size of the mess inherited - the extent of which we apparently knew nothing about - will take longer to unravel.

Now we get statements of future intent, which are testing the patience of our daily reality. As I have said before, fixing Kenya is not a 100-day job, but we still want better in 100 days! It is difficult not to escape the feel that a fresh lens on security (in all of its dimensions from food to economic to personal) is where it starts - the quick fixes that "secure" Kenyans as we await the fruits of "The Plan".

Go to the "known unknowns". Our fundamental one here is the politics. We know that we don't know enough about how politics will continue to impinge on our futures, including any fruits that Kenya Kwanza brings to the table. Kenya Kwanza knows that without the traditional idea of an official opposition, it isn't quite sure how opposition and/or oversight of its agenda will manifest (simply they know that Azimio, or its constituent parties, might do something but they don't know what).

This may be the reason for well-justified public suspicions that Kenya Kwanza's post-election actions suggest a preference for an uncontested framework in which the agenda is "bulldozed through", despite regular calls "to oversight us". The Kenyan public is always quick to see through this kind of "double speak", but the real known unknown is here is trust.

These next too are equally interesting. Our "unknown unknown" is one from time eternal. Politicians make promises. What do all these fine statements we get mean for what we will look like when it's done, especially with all these emerging "discoveries of dilapidation"? This time around, will we actually be a more prosperous and just Kenyan society? Let's call this the outcome to impact question often forced on us by development partners when we ask them for money.

Going by what we have been hearing this far, Kenya Kwanza hasn't quite gotten to its own sense of "what it doesn't know that it doesn't know" yet. Its promises are fashioned against a backdrop of a predicted global economic recession running through 2023 and 2024 even as it seeks a year that takes us deep into 2023 to really get going. But, let's be fair and make optimism (rather than cynicism) and caution (not certainty) the words that we must grapple with.

To be clear, as I constantly state, these are still early days for Kenya Kwanza. And while this is a very informal perspective of our current north and south poles, there is merit in considering human security, trust, optimism, caution, humility and realism as the softer key words that might better guide Kenya Kwanza's relentless drive towards building a better Kenya at a rate of knots.