Governments, like private corporations, require cutting-edge talent to run efficiently, effectively, innovatively, and profitably.
That’s why the specter of bogus papers and incompetent personnel filling public offices is frightening. We can’t be competitive as a country under such shameful, criminal yet avoidable circumstances.
Small wonder that, even with massive budgetary allocations, public enterprises have hopelessly and perpetually failed the citizenry.
Incompetent and unqualified public servants jeopardise Kenya’s strategic future. They’re, in essence, the silent cancer that is killing Kenya slowly, painfully. They need to be chopped of ASAP.
Our bad manners would be sacrilegious in other jurisdictions that understand statecraft and, therefore, allow meritocracy to reign.
Take the USA for instance. Aware of the power of top talent, in 1990, Congress initiated the H-1B Visa program. The philosophical underpinning of this special Visa is to afford the US to attract specialized folks into its jurisdiction. It’s not for nothing that the US is a hotbed of startups, innovation, and patents – a superpower.
To be fair, in Kenya, someone is trying to trim the suckers. The EACC and DCI have tried to nab the cheats. But, so far, it’s more of lip service. It’s easy to nab those with forged education papers. But the problem is deeper. We urgently need to smoke out those with authentic certificates but did not go through the mandatory academic formation.
Dumbing Ground
Indeed, our offices are full of brigades of staff who claim possession of genuine academic certificates issued by legitimate institutions, yet, in practice, there’s a huge chasm between what the papers assert and what the officers can deliver. Incompetence is rife in our organisations because staff bought exams and outsourced writing of theses in their so-called education days. The result is ineptitude. Some of them can hardly construct a coherent thought, write a memo, or simply work. There are also undisciplined and lack in sound values. Yet, even with runaway incompetence, most organisations have conveniently chosen to bury heads in the sand. It’s a clear indecent case of complacency and complicity.
The public service, sadly, has for a long time been a playground for influential people in society to dump their cronies, mistresses, and relatives. That’s how public service, as a vocation, was killed. In fact, we have, as a society, accepted these kind of vices as a matter of course. Sad.
But this model is unsustainable. It has spectacularly failed to usher the country to Canaan. Instead, it has produced mediocrity, sterility of imagination, incompetence, inefficiency, corruption, and toxic work environment riddled by vicious organizational politics. If you disconnect the rigors and sanctity of scholarship and pupilage from work, you are basically courting disaster. The looser is the taxpayer and the country as a collective.
Lest we forget, the Kenyan society chose the competitive marketplace philosophy of doing stuff. It means that ambition, hard work, talent, innovation should be honored and rewarded. We’re not an egalitarian society. It’s therefore criminal and even immoral to have a select few beating the system at the expense of the common good.
Apart from technical competence to do work, proper schooling and education opens new vistas in people. A robust education, especially with a tinge of the humanities, prepares bureaucrats for civil service and citizenship all critical for the construction of the state and its wealth.
Weaponised BSCs
One of the solutions to rid the public services of shenanigans would have been the Balanced Score Card (BSC) introduced in the civil service under the late President Mwai Kibaki’s regime.
Though noble in intention, the tool has been ruthlessly sullied and adulterated. Most folks lack the understanding of its fundamentals. Some who administer it are themselves the culprits of either fake papers or sexually transmitted grades or other unethical and immoral means used to secure and retain jobs. Regrettably, in what’s clearly a criminal enterprise, the BSC is even being weaponised by supervisors. This is silly by every metric.
This brings us to the next possible remedy- competence exams. See, in places like China, civil servants take entrance exams. For us, to begin with, we’ll need a radical and aggressive examination system for the existing workforce. The Kenya School of Government could be tasked with this critical exercise. It will be expensive, disruptive, but will be worth it in the long run.
Bold Leadership
We need someone to bell the cat. That’s why it all boils down to leadership. We love arguing that the public sector is rotten beyond repair. True. The sector has its fair share of demons. Still, the demons can be exorcised with the right will and leadership. We need a new zeitgeist in the public sector. We need leaders who are ambitious, imaginative, judicious, bold, transformative, and visionary. If such leaders cherish excellence, they will never entertain, ignore, or protect, mediocrity in their realms.
Mr. Wamanji is a Strategic Communication Expert and an Analyst of Foreign Affairs. X @manjis