You may need a shower afterwards

My friend Ashford will never, ever take a paid position with the Government of Kenya. He will consult for it, offering counsel wherever it is sought, but Ashford has vowed never to become a public servant. He believes that it will end badly for him if he does. Ashford will be the first to admit that he is not perfect, but even he doesn't think that he has the capacity to sink to the depths that public servants have sunk to in the past decade or so. As a public servant, I cannot say that Ashord is wrong; I can only lament how true his sentiments and fears are.

I read keenly what Sunny Bindra writes. When he assesses the business management environment, he offers us insights into the minds and behaviours of good and bad leaders. His advice is often invaluable and quite frequently pin-prickingly annoying when applied to the public service. He has attempted to deconstruct for us the traits that make a good leader and the characteristics of a bad boss. If Mr Bindra and Ashford were to sit down together, they would be surprised by how much they agreed on.

For instance, they would agree that a good leader is unafraid to make hard decisions. Mr Bindra could perchance point to the case of Unilever East Africa's chocolate-flavoured Blue Band spread. The concept behind it was solid. The science, as much as the laboratory could recreate real-world circumstances was spot on. The business case for it was persuasive. All it would take was a minor tweak to the manufacturing plant and Unilever would laugh all the way to the bank. The roll-out for the product was preceded by a publicity campaign that must have cost tens of millions of shillings. Yet when the product finally hit the shelves, it was an unmitigated disaster.

For whatever reason, the product couldn't sit fr long on supermarket shelves without going bad. Customers hated it. Unilever yanked it off the shelves within a week and drew a line on the sorry experience. Ashford and Mr Bindra would probably agree with the swift action of Unilever's bosses; had it been the Government of Kenya, the first month would have been spent looking for someone to blame for the fiasco, while the product refused to sell, pissed off more customers, alienated existing customers and cost the company hundreds of millions. It is almost certain that it wouldn't get pulled off the shelf until a year later. By the time the whole episode was over, no lessons would have been learned, and there would be political casualties all over the place.

What disgusted Ashford wasn't merely the mismanagement of public affairs but the corruption that thrives because of that mismanagement. Every time we hear of so-and-so's credentials, the clock starts counting down before those credentials are put to the test when serious questions of integrity are raised. No one has escaped the accusations; few have been able to beat them back. That is distressing and it limits the number of professionals who would agree to work for or with the Government. One other thing I believe Ashford and Mr Bindra would have in common is that neither would want their stellar reputations sullied by supping, even with very long spoons, from a pot of broth associated with the Government. According to Ashford, one needs a shower afterwards when shaking hands and rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers in the corridors of power. It is that disgusting.