A government that won't learn will keep governing by crisis

President William Ruto chairs a Cabinet meeting at State House, Nairobi. [PCS]

Kenya has become remarkably good at producing reports. Almost every major crisis is followed by a familiar sequence: a task force is appointed, a commission established, an inquiry launched, or a new policy announced.

Assurances are given that lessons have been learnt and that similar failures will not recur. Yet the floods return. The droughts return. The public controversies return. Citizens wonder whether our institutions have learnt anything at all. The challenge is not simply one of political will or implementation. It is something deeper: a failure of institutional learning. Perhaps this explains why so many of our national frustrations, from industrial transformation and youth employment to floods, taxation, public confidence, and justice, continue to recur despite years of analysis and reform efforts.

Institutions learn much as people do. They acknowledge mistakes honestly, preserve institutional memory, assign responsibility, adjust procedures, and change incentives so that the same failures become less likely over time. When they cannot do this, every predictable event becomes an unforeseen emergency, and government is reduced to governing by crisis.

Consider our response to climate shocks. Kenya’s alternating cycle of floods and drought is hardly new. Each episode generates emergency meetings, humanitarian appeals, and promises of better preparedness. Yet too often the same weaknesses reappear: inadequate drainage, delayed mitigation measures, insufficient investment in water infrastructure, and poor coordination between agencies. Reports are written, but their lessons are seldom embedded in institutional practice.

The same pattern is evident in public accountability. Two years after the June 25 Gen Z protests, the country continues to grapple with questions of police accountability, proportional use of force, and constitutional rights. While circumstances evolve, the institutional response has too often relied on familiar patterns of containment, public assurances, and limited accountability. When institutions fail to absorb the lessons of public trust and constitutional responsibility, the conditions that produced the crisis remain largely unchanged.

Part of the problem lies in how our public institutions operate. Too often, crises are followed by leadership reshuffles rather than institutional reform. New office holders inherit the same incentives and constraints that contributed to previous failures, while valuable institutional memory is lost. We change the faces, but rarely the systems that reward short-term firefighting over long-term learning and performance.

True reform requires changing these mechanics. It means strengthening professional public institutions that retain knowledge beyond political cycles. It means detecting failures early through effective monitoring and internal accountability, rather than waiting for public outrage. It means publishing inquiry reports, acting on their recommendations, and building rules-based systems that are capable of learning from experience. Learning is one of the least visible but most valuable forms of state capability. It enables governments to become wiser without becoming larger, and stronger without becoming more coercive.

It transforms failure from something to be concealed into an opportunity for institutional improvement. Kenya does not lack commissions, policies, or diagnoses. Nor does it lack ideas. The greater challenge is ensuring that institutions remember, adapt, and change.

Every nation experiences crises. The real measure of governance is whether each crisis leaves its institutions better prepared for the next. Reform is ultimately measured not by the number of reports we produce, but by the mistakes we stop repeating.

-The writer is a consultant in governance. [email protected]