Paper tigers and caporegimes

A bureaucracy is known by its ability to establish a specific culture, whether for good or ill, that seeks to achieve the objectives of the bureaucracy, including self-perpetuation and self-replication. A good bureaucracy adapts to changing circumstances. While it will almost always resist change, it will find ways to change while retaining its core identity. The Kenyan bureaucratic state is not known for adapting to change. Certainly not since the abortive coup of 1982.

I don't know if there is a person with the institutional memory and the political intelligence to write an authoritative history of the Kenyan administrative state. I hope there is. And I hope that person is able to tell the chaff from the rice.

But until that history is written, some of us have to do our bit. I have had the immense privilege of serving in little-known agencies and life-altering ones as well. My memories of the work that I did prior to my current station still do me a power of good whenever the spirit is low. My memories of my current station are a mixed bag. Some of that is my fault. I should have known better.

But when I take a step back and look at the bigger picture, I can see that the legacy of Nyayoism is alive and well. When Mr Odinga announced that he would carry forward his anti-government fulminations, I knew that his words would spook the regime of the day. It is advised by some of the least educated men and women Kenya has had the misfortune to be governed by. Mr Odinga might as well as have waved a red banner inferno of an enflamed bull because what he has done to an insecure, uncertain political institution is to remind it that it exists but only for the forbearance of the people it purports to govern (or rule, depending on your perspective).

Signs of the poor administrative chops of the advisors were evident on the day the president took the oath of office. In his speech, which must have been drafted by a small-minded man, he announced a major public policy shift that would have profound ramifications on the security state. The announcement, in and of itself, was not wrong or wrong-headed; what was wrong was the way it was going to be given effect. The president used the words "I shall" where he, ideally, should have used the more malleable "My government shall".

A presidential speech is a mixture of what the president wants combined with what his minders think they can get away with without the president finding out. In this case, uneducated minders put the president on a collision course with the law. The matter was, eventually, addressed but it was the first in a series of bad ideas that don't seem to be reducing.

I do not purport to know what goes on in Kitchen Cabinets but I have been around long enough to know that if your kitchen cabinet is full of chest-thumping my-way-or-the-highway windbags, it is unlikely to offer wise counsel or, in the event that the politics gets a bit heated, have the ability to form an effective war council.

When Michael Corleone chose to fight his war with the other Families in New York, he was wise enough to replace Tom Hagen with Albert Neri. Hagen, Micheal said, was not a wartime consiglieri; Neri was. And it is because of Al Neri that Michael trounced Barzini and his allies and punished Carlo Rizzo for his betrayal. There is a political war afoot; one side has an Al Neri in its ranks but the other side doesn't even have a Tom Hagen to offer counsel. Instead, different capos think of themselves as caporegimes when in fact, they are mere foot soldiers. They don't have the strategic intelligence to make the right moves in a political war.

Instead, you see them making statements that only they understand and appeal only to their own constituents. They paint the other side as, variously, under the sway of witchcraft, bloodlust and imbecility. They deny that the crowds that flock to the other side have agency. Instead, they paint them as unwitting dupes. This is not a message that will resonate with them. It will, instead, piss them the fuck off. Unintelligent and overconfident men tend to make these kinds of mistakes. More broadly, the administrative state has fallen more and more under the sway of these men. As a consequence, routine administrative functions have been undermined. Only the people will suffer, especially those who are vulnerable, weak and poor.