Kenya's governance is also in need of 'cartographic' correction

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

The UN General Assembly made an unassuming yet historically monumental decision by voting in favour of the "Correct the Map" resolution, thus officially unveiling the four-hundred-year-old Mercator fallacy that makes Africa look to be roughly of the same size as Greenland. In fact, Africa is 14 times bigger than Greenland. A few days prior to the Assembly's decision, the inaugural Africa Mindset Reset forum took place in Kigali under the aegis of the African School of Governance with the aim of tackling another similar illusion. The task of the forum was clear: Africa should move away from "Pan-Africanism" which is the idealisation of common identity to "Meta-Africanism"—the execution of real institutional practices.

If one overlays these events, we will see the objective picture of Kenya's ongoing leadership crisis. We are experiencing what can be called a political Mercator projection. For decades, Kenyans have been brainwashed into lowering their expectations of governance and at the same time increasing the expectations of their political chiefs. We got stuck in a low-energy equilibrium which makes the simplest things like a repaired road, delayed scholarship or a magnificently launched but unfunded project look like a grand achievement.

This is not only a political failure as it has been correctly observed by Ibn Khaldun i.e if a state’s Asabiyyah (the state’s social unity) begins to disintegrate, its leaders resort to performative rituals instead of really effective governance. In Kenya, these rituals mean an endless chain of unnecessary activities such as opening hospitals or counselling in different capacities. All the initiatives are presented with the pomp of lifting rockets into space but are eventually doomed to fail.

This psychological projection leads to a self-replenishing heater. When people are always deprived of basic efficiency, the boundary of outrage is lowered and apathy is turned into a cushion for the failure of the state. In the field of control systems, a failure, in reality, means the absence of the error in the signalling. The fact that people celebrate the mere restoration of energy supply or cleaning of a sewer line instead of demanding them gives a false signal to politicians that everything is fine and allows them to waste public funds on other needs without raising any alarm.

To capitalise on the ‘Meta-African’ opportunity in our lifetime, we must reset the human relationship with the state and switch from a culture of obedience to a culture of action. This involves getting rid of three systemic hurdles of reality.

The first hurdle is called ‘latency’. In system engineering, latency stands for the time elapsed between a command given and its execution. Our political system has virtually no problems with making empty promises and assigning huge budgets for those promises, however, it encounters a serious problem of excess latency.

While leaders announce their plans, there seems to be a long delay in the implementation. This delay can last for a few years.

Then, second, there is the illusion of containment, according to which the leaders and people believe that the degenerative changes that occur in institutions can be limited to a specific area, for example, the healthcare system will not affect the economy. These systems are closely connected with one another, and when one fails, the interdependence of systems leads to the failure of all the rest.

And the third issue is the bogey of passing notes i.e. where our national metrics measure activity instead of achievement. We count how many task forces were formed, how many reports were polished, and how many summits were attended, measuring the input while wholly ignoring the thermodynamic loss of output.

Moreover, the transition to Meta-Africanism necessitates the end of the tyranny of the political cycle of 1,825 days, which perceives state action as a disposable process for five years instead of a continuous constructive process over generations. In Kenya, every election acts as a harsh reset, which clears institutional memory while also removing the pipelines that have only partially been set up for construction of new vanity projects.

An engineered state cannot survive on a five-year schedule. The preservation of continuity in institutions will involve the creation of sovereign and non-partisan engineering agencies that have legal authority over long-term funding of capital projects, thus protecting utility systems, transport facilities, and digital infrastructure from sudden changes brought by elections or political appointments.

We cannot fix a mechanical failure with moral pleas. In order to conduct a paradigm shift, it is necessary to make use of proper design and good approaches to execution. The Parliament has to introduce a law that would prohibit the launching of new capital projects when previous projects have not yet reached an acceptable degree of completion. The “groundbreaking ceremony” should be dropped as a concept altogether.

Also, policy execution must be made mandatory by law; once the financing is provided, the legislation must enable determining maximum timing and, thus, treating bureaucratic delays as a criminal negligence instead of customary bureaucratic practice.

The last requirement is that citizens need to leave behind the passive complaining and turn to active questioning, generating legal feedback loops through civic organisations stuck state funding if the planned execution is delayed.

As in all aspects of governance, so in engineering: An engine producing noise only is kaput. Integrity is measured not by the beauty of a commitment, but by how prompt and effective actions are undertaken.

- The writer is the Communications and Partnerships Manager at Emerging Leaders Foundation – Africa (www.elfafrica.org). X: @Edward_Kalya