Monday, September 21, 2015

Where to, waziri?

What does it mean that the people in charge of making policy do not make policy? Those in charge of overseeing the implementation of policies, do not conduct any oversight; and those in charge of resolving disputes between those who make policies and those who implement policies, and between or among those who implement policies, or between the people and everyone else, do not do a good job of it.

The government must evolve, whether it is the executive, the legislatures or the judiciary. The  constitutional commissions, never mind what they believe their mandates to be, are not makers of policy, neither are they implementers of policy, except in a very limited way. They, and the independent offices, are the checks and balances that we know will not be found among the traditional arms of government.

The vexed subject of teachers' salaries is a thorny enough subject to warrant a clarification of the mandates of the arms of government and their agencies. The executive, through the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, and through the Teachers' Service Commission, is responsible for making policies for the education sector, and together with the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, for the wage policy in the educations sector. The Ministry makes the policy on education, generally. The TSC hires and manages teachers, generally. The SRC recommends a wage policy for teachers (but not for the education sector), but the TSC implements it, with tweaks here and there. This is the complex system that the Constitution has established.

The former Constitution was simpler; the President was an imperial one and all decisions were his decisions, all policies were his policies. The TSC was a rubber stamp for his whims and desires. The judiciary was of no consequence. Teachers think that they pushed the president to the wall in 1997; they didn't. He had already made up his mind on an exit strategy; one of the elements of this strategy was to keep his successor's government busily putting out political and fiscal fires he would never have time to go after him for his twenty four years. It worked brilliantly. Mwai Kibaki couldn't solve the teachers' salaries dispute. Nor will Uhuru Kenyatta if he is not careful.

Kenya is famous for making good policies, so the legend goes. It is a legend because the last well-conceived policy made by the national executive is the one that gave birth to Vision 2030. Since then, successive ministries have published ever ridiculous draft policies that never see the light of day. If the Ministry of Education has a policy for the education sector in Kenya, it is not sharing. It is more than likely that it does not. If the TSC has a policy on the management of teachers, it is not sharing. It is likely that it does have a policy, most commissions tend to, but it is unsure about how the policy will be interpreted by "outsiders" so it is limiting access to it out of fear that the policy might, after all, be bad.

What is clear is that the implementation of policies has been slipshod for a decade and a half, now, and the Ministry of Education is only the most obvious of the inept. Successive ministers have presided over the deterioration in the sector, using their offices for political reasons and not much else. 

The Cabinet Secretary is treading a well-trodden path; he will not be the man to shine light on the system, prescribe solutions for its ailments, or successfully publish an education policy that makes sense. He is unable to answer a simple question: what is his mandate? He is unable to separate his mandate from that of the Commission and he fundamentally misunderstands the place of the SRC in all this. If drawing up a simple organogram defeats him, I do not see how he will be able to oversee the making and implementation of a policy that should seek to make improvements - significant improvements - in the education sector, including on what teacher deserve and what they can get.

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