Lessons for county chief executives as they navigate an uncharted path

Council of Governors chairman Isaac Ruto addresses the Governors Summit in Naivasha last week. Photo/Suleiman Mbatiah 

By Wallace Kantai

In Summary

• Two encounters that provide an eye-opener for leaders still groping through the maze of a new system.

Last week, I had two interesting encounters that were rather eye-opening. The first was with a set of government leaders who perhaps have the hardest task in this country.

The second one was with an intellectual superstar. While the two meetings, nominally, had nothing to do with each other, they got me thinking, and led me to a series of profound insights.

The first meeting was the Governors Summit, which took place in Naivasha at the beginning of the week. The conference brought together most of the county chief executives to discuss mostly economic issues.

The star of the show was President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who held forth for almost three hours, effortlessly fielding questions about everything from his legacy, to issues of tea marketing, to governance.

It is quite interesting sitting in a roomful of Kenya’s governors. The first thought that strikes you is just how many they are.

Investors

The fact that there are more than 40 governors in a country like Kenya means that in a room such as that and in the public mind, it is quite easy to become anonymous.

There will still be some star governors (those who, in previous careers, were well-known; or those who have mastered the dark arts of public relations), but a significant majority are people whom you’ll pass during a tea break without a glimpse of recognition. Which, to my mind, presents both a quandary and an opportunity.

With the clamour for investment and job-creation coming from constituents, governors are having to metaphorically shout themselves hoarse to be heard by investors and the national government.

The shouting takes many forms. Rare is the week when you do not hear of a county delegation jetting off to some far-off locale in the ostensible search for investors.

Deals are even announced, although, for many, the time between the announcement and the actual ground-breaking for an investment is uncomfortably long.



Speak to local investors and the picture becomes even more interesting. I had a chat with a gentleman whose company has national ambitions.

His dilemma is one you’ll hear voiced by many of his counterparts — he obviously cannot put up offices in every single county that would like investment, but he cannot, at the same time, be seen to be playing favourites when it comes to his investment decisions.

This leaves governors scrambling to take part in beauty contests in the attempt to show their (counties’) best faces to these investors. At this stage of county development, it is still unclear what structures are in place for adjudicating these beauty contests to ensure that the needs of the counties and of the investors are both served.

The second encounter was with Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Stanford University. That title, though, does not do justice to how important he looms in the intellectual firmament. He is most famous for a book he wrote in 1992, proclaiming (to put it simplistically), the end of history.

The title was taken from Marxist theory, which said that Communism represented the final stage of historical development. His argument was that the other side had won, and that democratic capitalism represented the culmination of sociopolitical development.