Thursday, September 5, 2019

Kenyan woes emanate from lack of leadership

 
The old, and tired, question has always been about whether or not we elect the right leader(s). The new, and young, question, I now understand, is “if you were away from your daily business, would you trust your leader to take care of the business?” That’s what many Kenyans are quietly discussing. Let’s call this our democratic epiphany, inspired, no less, by the need to survive the “pain of government”.
Unfortunately, the anachronism we call Kenyan politics conflates past, present and future. Which explains why our latest education experiment doesn’t sound like a proper balance between life skills (values and virtues), knowledge (for its own sake) and skills for life (the future of work in a digital
world).
More prosaically, that’s why universal health care (UHC) can’t be delivered with reportedly near universal medical negligence (meaning lifestyle isn’t understood) and poor living conditions (think dirty rivers). Then, we bounce our water scarcity against families living in forests that are our water towers.
Think about these as leadership questions. There’s many top speeches and stories, but zero results.
Recent experience further explains. That, today, we have people in Kenya not registered (Huduma Namba) or counted (Census) is official malarkey, especially since it was abundantly clear, from the “seeding” of questions, that the two are linked. This was not a failure of process, but honest leadership.

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