What Shikuku's death means to us.

Martin Shikuku's death exposes something else about our peculiar habits: we never prepare for the succession, whether it is in the political, corporate or administrative arenas. The man in charge of administration at the Western Australia Parliamentary Counsel's Office is retiring in 4 months, and he has a succession plan in place. Many of the senior drafters here are also retiring over the next three years and he is concerned that there are too few being recruited at lower levels. He has set in motion a recruitment plan that will pair new counsel with senior ones for mentoring over a period of 2 years so that as the older ones retire, the younger ones can step into their shoes and assume responsibility for some of the more demanding tasks.

In Kenya, it was always presumed to be malicious any consideration of the death or departure of persons in positions of responsibility. Indeed, the Attorney-General once declared it a treasonous offence to contemplate the death of the president. As a result, frequently, we are unprepared for the departures of leaders. Martin Shikuku, in contrast, since his exit from the political field, had always presumed that he was soon going to die and so he prepared himself for the event. He bought a coffin and dug his grave. It was a subtle message to the politicians in charge; prepare for your exit or the country will suffer.

This failure to prepare can be starkly demonstrated in the way the ICC Four continue to ignore the march of time and the changing environment. Messrs Kenyatta, Ruto and Sang continually fail to appreciate that the International Criminal Court is not a local Magistrate's Court in which their stature and prominence may be used to brow-beat the court into acting favourably towards them. When the matter first came up for public debate, they assumed that if anyone was going to be named in the famous Waki Envelope, it would be the President and Prime Minister. After all, in their opinion, they had been fighting for one or the other. So it came as a shock when their names were in the list after all. They had conspired with their colleagues to reject the President's and Prime Minister's pleas for a local mechanism for the 2007/08 crimes. They even ignored their friend and supporter, Mutula Kilonzo when he advised them against preferring The Hague Option rather than the local one. Today, they are compounding their error by concentrating too much on their political contest with the Prime Minister than in preparing for their trials, set to commence in 2013.

The same can be observed in the higher reaches of the civil service. Heads of department rarely have a succession plan in place; it is presumed to be the preserve of the Public Srvice Commission and the Directorate of Personnel Management. Many senior civil servants are appointed for their political loyalty and not for their technical abilities. For this reason many of them spend a vast majority of their waking hours conspiring to ensure that they keep their political masters happy than in ensuring their departments are well run or effective. The rest of the service views this as the preferred mode of operation and thus, tend to concentrate more on internal intrigue and politics and less on ensuring service delivery. The result is plain to see: the customer satisfaction surveys constantly rate the civil service and other arms of the government very poorly.

Perhaps a new government will be able to sweep away the detritus of 50 years of Uhuru. The Constitution lays the foundation for the establishment of an effective, efficient public service. Emphasis on merit is the key ingredient in reviving the civil service to its previous glory. Of course, success will not be achieved without expending serious resources. But in the light of competing demands - from the police, the teachers, university lecturers, doctor, nurses, etc. - the government must prioritise carefully. Favouring one over the other may be a recipe for chaos - strikes and go-slows. The late Shikuku shows that one can prepare; the question is: are we willing to draw the proper lessons from his death?