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Building private sector, State ties

From left: Kenya Private Sector Alliance Outgoing chair Flora Mutahi, Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Dr Erick Ruto, Investments, Trade and Industry Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria and Kenya Private Sector Alliance newly elected Chairman Jaswinder Bedi during a panel discussion at Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) 19th Annual General Meeting at Serena Hotel, Nairobi on June 15, 2023. PHOTO | BONFACE BOGITA | NMG

On June 15, I attended the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) AGM, where CEO Carole Kariuki and outgoing chair Flora Mutahi reeled off the activities and achievements of the previous 12 months.

As at previous AGMs, the sheer volume and variety were staggering to absorb – indeed two years ago I wrote a column about Kepsa’s 17th one, saying what an impressive event it was, and for the same reasons, commenting that a significant positive influence had been brought to bear on the wellbeing of not just the private sector but of Kenyans.

Jas Bedi was confirmed as Kepsa’s new chair, with Brenda Mbathi as deputy – two excellent choices. And I was delighted to see that at this year’s AGM, the newly-elected chair of the Chamber of Commerce Erick Rutto was with us.

He talked about the need for the two entities to work together, music to everyone’s ears.

Also present was Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria, who interacted with us for more than two hours.

“This meeting is seven months overdue,” he proclaimed, seeking an open, frank discussion that would enable his government to walk with us. The President would have been here today, he added, had it not been for his trip to Geneva.

“I’ve been to 27 countries and met with 14 presidents since coming into office,” he informed us, saying he wanted to see more of us in the room when he travels overseas.

Mr Kuria claimed the private sector is insufficiently focused on working for the country rather than for ourselves personally, our company or our sector — maybe not fully on-target for this Kepsa audience, for whom in my experience national wellbeing figures prominently.

His next challenge was to get us to think big, before hammering us for not spreading into enough foreign countries. “We are swimming pool champions in our own bathtubs,” he scoffed. Hmm, my sense is that more and more Kenyan companies are indeed going Africa-wide.

He then talked about setting up many more Special Economic Zones, and through public-private operations that benefit from a zero corporate tax.

These, he fully expects to generate a million jobs and asked how we will make his work easier. His ultimate goal?

To have Singapore come and benchmark with us. Indeed, while we used to go to Ethiopia to benchmark Special Economic Zones, recently an Ethiopian delegation came to Kenya to see how ours are developing, he tells us.

Mr Kuria expects to see SEZs in each of our 47 counties, and this by sharing the funding for their establishment between the national and the county governments.

To date, despite all their financial constraints, 14 counties have contributed – seven from pro-government ones and seven from those led by the opposition.

He is also promoting Kenya to take the leadership in Africa for spreading digitisation. Through the American Chamber he’s been bringing together US tech firms such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, he related, encouraging them with preferential tax rates.

His next point, which he asked Jas to also elaborate on — largely in his capacity as chair of Keproba, the Brand Kenya and export promotion entity — was about the facilitation of exports.

This is through establishing “logistical infrastructure”, an initial 20 warehouses around Africa, and eventually 50 globally.

The Kenya International Trade Agency (Kita), is being formed, and it will hold the master leases for the warehouses, with exporters taking out sub-leases. Exporters will be allowed to share container space for shipping their goods.

By 2030, Jas told us, the objective is that the value of our exports should be equal to the value of our imports. And Mr Kuria explained that the commercial offices within our embassies will now be situated outside of them, selling locally on behalf of our exporters.

How will this be financed? By taxing imports, thereby making imports more expensive and enabling local value-adding manufacturing.

The CS concluded that he looks forward to working with Kepsa and the Chamber.

What an uplifting morning it was, far away from all the Kuria noise we’ve been exposed to since!

Competent or confident politician?

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Some time ago I wrote an article about Trump as a man whose I’m-OK-You’re-not-OK behaviour, one that required consistent win-lose interactions with others, masked a deeply insecure soul. Yet despite these insecurities, despite this lack of self-esteem, he built up extraordinary self-confidence, and through bullying, cheating and lying he achieved all that he did.

I refer to this as I recently read a provocative article in the London Times about Britain’s immediate former Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The headline said it all: “Truss proves talent-free bluster isn’t just for men”. And the opening paragraph tells us she broke one of the last glass ceilings. Not as the first female PM in her country, for she was not, but as “the first woman to reach the highest office propelled by gargantuan self-belief alone”.

Writer Janice Turner rightly reckons the kind of self-belief she displayed has not been associated with her gender. Indeed, she tells us, feminists have been known to pray “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre man”.

We’ve been reading a lot about women holding back from higher office while younger and less experienced men lobby their way through. Here though, Ms Turner observed “a shameless, narcissistic, talent-free sense of entitlement”. Wow. Lots in common with Trump for sure, and indeed with so many politicians the world over.

I have also written about the competence-confidence matrix, with the competent one who lacks confidence often suffering from the “imposter syndrome”, while the confident one who lacks competence displays a cocky arrogance. The ideal position, as espoused by my heroes such as Ed Schein and Adam Grant, are those who behave with “confident humility”.

So where is Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss’s successor, in all of this? In a much better place. We have been reading about the values with which he was brought up and which it appears he has been able to largely hold on to despite entering the cut and thrust world of win-lose politics: family, honesty, education and hard work. Not a bad quartet.

His competence, certainly in matters financial, is indisputable. And his communication skills are definitely superior to hers. Well, that’s no big deal, as rarely have I come across such a wooden performer as Liz Truss in such a high office. Boy was she in need of coaching…but who knows, maybe her excess of self-esteem over self-awareness made her uncoachable.

How about our politicians here? For sure some are more competent than others, and some are better communicators than others. Many are at their best at high-octane campaign rallies whose objectives are mere entertainment, hype and goodies-distribution, while others know how to switch between such show-business performance and more serious and substantive output.

To be a politician, confidence is everything. As each one puts themselves forward for election, they are certain they will win, however justified or unjustified their optimism. So it was with Truss, so it was with Sunak; and so it was with all our political candidates in August, including those who lost.

Our responsibility as citizens is to study the competence-confidence mix of those who seek our votes, where competence includes adherence to good values and where mere confidence is woefully insufficient.

It was good to see the Mkenya Daima campaign focusing on this requirement for not only selecting good men and women, but then holding those who succeed at the ballot to account. It is why the Mkenya Daima tag line is Nitatenda Wajibu Wangu (I will do my responsibility).

It’s so dispiriting to me to see huge numbers of voters in the developed world casting their support for the Trumps and the Trusses of this world.

It shows the weakness in the civic education provided in so many countries that allows for populist promise-makers to get away with what they clearly should not… including Boris Johnson and his Brexit ones.

We’ve been through our elections just a few months ago. Have we selected enough of the humbly competent? Stay on the ball, fellow Kenyans, as President William Ruto has challenged us to do.

Rishi Sunak promised British citizens a government of “professionalism, integrity and accountability at all levels”. And President Ruto, when he confirmed his new cabinet, also called for integrity and accountability. We must indeed “do our responsibility”.

Avoiding family wars that ruin businesses

These days I am being invited more frequently to help align family members within their businesses so they can lead the organisations they own more effectively.

I am encouraged by those who reach out to me for such assistance, as it speaks of being realistic about the importance of cohesiveness among them and of feeling optimistic that they can indeed do better.

In my capacity as an adviser — or, as I often label myself, coach — I first listen to each family member involved, getting a sense of their personalities and styles, and of the roles they play in their enterprise.

In a spirit of “appreciative inquiry” I like to start by having them tell me about the achievements they are proudest of and the strengths that explain them, and then asking them to share the challenges they face — including and not least with other family members.

For this to happen I don’t rush into these topics, but begin by building a relaxed, cheerful and trusting relationship with them, getting them to talk more generally about their lives, while revealing something about mine.

Business school

As I was preparing to write this article I caught sight of a book I’d bought some years ago at the London Business School bookshop but had never got round to reading.

Published in 2008, Family Wars is about some of the biggest family-run companies in the world, showing how in-fighting among family members threatened to bring about their downfall.

It covers families such as Ford, Gucci and the Watsons of IBM, using these as examples of different categories of wars, not least between fathers and sons, among siblings, and as a result of marriages between families.

It also provides advice for anyone involved in a family business, offering suggestions on how to avoid such problems.

The book’s authors are London Business School Prof Nigel Nicholson, whose research interests include the psychology of family business, and Grant Gordon, the director-general of the Institute for Family Business and a fifth-generation member and former senior executive of William Grant & Sons, the distillers of Glenfiddich whisky (my favourite).

Despite relating stories of specific family “wars” they are careful to point out that many with family ownership outperform other kinds of organisations, and that some of the world’s oldest companies are those that have remained owned by their founding families.

I related very closely to what I read about both the kinds of challenges that family businesses commonly face, and how to prevent them and handle them if and when they arise.

Not least about the wisdom of “appointing skilled non-family professionals to fill business leadership roles”; “appointing a neutral ‘ombudsman’ as co-mentor of a sibling team”; and “instituting appraisals and regular feedback on work output and mentoring for family members”.

Not surprisingly, Grant and Nicholson refer to the lack of trust as “the real killer”, where one person sees another as unreliable, inconsistent, devious or duplicitous. And – as I do – they advocate for a spirit of forgiving and seeking forgiveness.

To avoid undue conflict, a culture of equity and fairness must prevail, with no cheating and taking of shortcuts. Worst of all is the hiring of lawyers to sue one another, never mind if the dirty linen starts getting washed in public.

Just as insufficient cohesiveness leads family members to either waste energy in fruitless attempts to win battles at the expense of a relative, or to disengage and scatter, so excessive cohesion, where families retreat into their own exclusive world, are also unhealthy.

Consensus builder

The challenge is to nurture an atmosphere where differences can be aired and consensus built, in a spirit of give and take.

Yes, we want the leadership team in family businesses to be diverse — including these days by including the women. We want representation of a spectrum from elders to millennials, and it’s good for members to have varied exposure to education and to other cultures and countries.

Some will have a greater appetite for risk than others. Some will be more focused on longer-term sustainability and on being fair to all key stakeholders and some will be keener than others on professionalising.

The question is how such diversity can be brought together without generating wars, and by whom.

Who in the family is the consensus builder, the mediator? Or does the business, as so many do, require external help to keep the peace and allow each family member to contribute and thrive in their own way?

Balancing the State and people power

Eight years ago I wrote a column about Why Nations Fail, the book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and more recently I acquired the subsequent one by these two economics professors, The Narrow Corridor.

It’s another global analysis of how liberty and wellbeing flourish in some states but degenerate to authoritarianism or anarchy in others.

New opportunities and threats emerge, as some successful societies continue to thrive while others falter.

In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson concluded that nations thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of only a few.

Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are much more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few.

Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions, which distribute political power widely so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy.

Conversely, extractive political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of a few reinforce extractive economic institutions to hold on to power.

What are they telling us now, in The Narrow Corridor? In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak, and human freedom has been suppressed – either by force or merely through customs and norms.

States have either been too weak to protect individuals from these threats or they have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate balance is struck between the state and society.

Which nations are more likely to succeed and to fail today? Which countries are becoming more inclusive in their economics and politics, and which ones will be leaving the narrow corridor of balanced liberty that requires adequate but not excessive state power?

With Covid having intensified inequality between rich and poor, between the digital and the non-digital, is the corridor narrowing further – including in countries like America?

And with ones like Hungary, India, Turkey and the Philippines having shifted to more autocratic styles, we have been confronted with the reality that political liberty is not such a steady or durable phenomenon.

Is Kenya within or beyond the narrow corridor? And either way, where are our ever-manoeuvring politicians taking us? Are we still just passive citizens waiting for our tribal princes to tell us for whom to vote?

Or will we at last select those who best understand what lies within the narrow corridor and how to have us inhabit this privileged space?

If America itself is finding it hard, with Republicans burying their heads in the Trumpian sands as they deny truth and sneer at science, and with us facing our elections in a year’s time, should this be cause for gloom and doom?

During our years since independence it could be argued that we have done better than many other countries – and not just in Africa – at surviving within the narrow corridor, balancing the power of the state and that of the people.

We should feel good about our evolution into multi-party politics and the devolution of power to the counties, about our reasonable freedom of speech and our relatively open economy.

Could we have done better? Of course. Will we? That’s a hard one. We have among us everything from Utopian optimists to self-flagellating pessimists.

What’s for sure is that, as everywhere, the struggle between state and society will continue. But it is not further constitutional tweaks, with yet more laws and regulations that will take us closer into the desired corridor or keep us there.

And it is not more duplication and fragmentation of state institutions.

No. It is all to do with values and how these are reflected in behaviour. How are we encouraging good behaviour, that promotes integrity and cohesion? And how are we penalising bad behaviour that prevents it?

We citizens must take seriously our responsibility for influencing the leaders of state institutions in ways that can see our vision of shared prosperity be actualised.

With all the talent and energy that exists in Kenya, surely this is doable.

Let’s return to quest for a new vision

In my last column I wrote about John Ngumi’s quest for a vision of Kenya, one that will help us emerge from our national malaise and offer a national goal and purpose that can excite and focus us.

Mr Ngumi worried that we live in a time of great cynicism and scepticism, with disbelief in the goodness, wisdom or purpose of anything government says or does, and a belief that those who lead us are uniformly selfish, greedy and immoral. This, he worried, has led us to having low expectations about our future, thanks to diminished national self-belief and self-confidence.

Despite these challenges, Mr Ngumi saw much to feel good about – in ICT, manufacturing, infrastructure development and elsewhere – providing an excellent base from which to galvanise our energies, drive and ingenuity. But for us to believe we must have a sense of purpose, a national ambition, he felt, and so – through me – he called for ideas.

What feedback did I receive from my article? What messages were proposed to inspire us, ones that previous vision statements (as laid out by Mr Ngumi in my article) failed to deliver?

Muriu Ngumi castigated the government for its fixation on numbers – ones like GDP growth and kilometres of road built. He called for not just the delivery of prosperity but alongside it for “a life of dignity”, where our children have a decent education that gives them a chance at a future where families can rely on the healthcare system and have adequate housing; a job to support them and their families; a police force and courts that are fair and protect society; and a government that respects our rights.

In his column that appeared the day after mine – in which he referred to Ngumi and my challenge – Dennis Kabaara laid out what he saw as being required for Kenya’s new normal under Covid-19, a more human “whole of society” view of the future, one that Kenyan families want and that keeps us away from the BBI of “Big Baron Interests”.

Mr Kabaara suggested we must develop a sustainable agriculture sector that provides us with all the food we need. He called for a fulfilment of basic rights that comprise education (including skills for life – as in the new Competency Based Curriculum), health, shelter, water and sanitation.

Next, access to assets and income opportunities, with R&D and innovation centres in counties and their regional blocs. Then participatory governance; and finally security and safety at a family level.

Hindpal Jabbal’s input aligned nicely with these contributions, as he reckoned “the one vision that Kenya lacks is self-reliance”. So he proposed this vision statement: “Kuji Jenga”… referring me to his April 2016 Daily Nation article in which he bemoaned our culture of dependency (along with our corrupt ways and our extreme inequality).

Where does Mike Eldon fit into all this? First, building on the earlier point of going beyond measures such as GDP and length of roads, Muriu Ngumi and I ask the question “So what?”. What is the impact of these outputs, the consequential benefits for the people of Kenya?

How do they lead to shared prosperity, as envisaged in our Vision 2030 but which has so far been, to put it mildly, elusive – now exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis?

I applaud the visionaries, while adding the need for managing the actualisation of their visions. For at least as important as crafting a vision is serious “performance management for results” (my preferred term over M&E). This has been sorely lacking, and partly thanks to the fragmentation of such functions between multiple agencies, each operating in its own silo.

We have the Presidential Delivery Unit, now in the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government; the Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate in the Ministry of Finance and Planning; and the Vision 2030 Delivery Secretariat, a semi-autonomous government agency. Surely these should be brought together.

Having said that, more and more of our counties are establishing county delivery units, or service delivery units, and these are becoming increasingly effective in achieving precisely what they were set up to do, enhancing the delivery of services to citizens. And in the emerging economic blocs, in particular the Lake Region one, they are coordinating initiatives between counties to achieve synergy among them.

In Kenya as elsewhere, we must build that more inclusive society, one that reverses the trend towards wealth for the few and allows for universal dignity.

This conversation is far from over. Please let’s keep it going.

Why Kenya needs brand new vision

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From time to time I am fortunate to be exposed to the highly thoughtful, well-informed and articulate WhatsApps of John Ngumi, and his most recent was one of his best. In it he asked for “an idea, a vision of Kenya, that will help get us out of our national malaise, will give us a national goal and purpose that can excite and focus us all”.

With that he took a step back into history, starting with the immediate pre-Independence period, when the national goal and cry was “Uhuru”, regularly interchanged with “Uhuru na Kenyatta”. These reflected a fervent belief that with Independence, and with Jomo Kenyatta freed from imprisonment and leading his people, all would be well for the future.

In the immediate post-Independence years, Ngumi reminded us, the national focus changed to “Uhuru na Kazi”. There may not have been unanimity as to what this actually entailed, and there were fierce ideological battles on what “Uhuru” meant to various groups of Kenyans, some who had benefited and some who had lost out. But there was a consensus that while we had hard work ahead of us to build a nation, we could do it.

The seventies saw malaise, cynicism and anger start getting into the national body politic, a result partly of the political turmoils of the 1960s, but also because of an inevitable sense of let-down as we grappled with nascent nationhood and its challenges.

There was a short-lived attempt to reignite a sense of national purpose through the Mwai Kibaki-led “The Kenya We Want” initiative, which sought to get us focused on the difficult economic years ahead post the 1973 oil price rise and subsequent global recession, acknowledging that we no longer had easy economic options. This never really caught on.

A brief period of optimism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was then followed by a time about which the less said about national visions, dreams and goals, the better.

The Second Liberation of the late 1980s refocused and galvanised Kenyans, eventually leading to the heady days of 2002-3, when all seemed possible. We didn’t really have a galvanising rallying call thereafter. That was not in the character or style of President Kibaki, but we did have a sense of doing things, with Vision 2030 epitomising the calm, somewhat dry, technocratic approach favoured by his administration.
And today? It struck Ngumi that we have reached a period “in which cynicism and scepticism reign supreme, a widespread and almost automatic disbelief in the goodness, wisdom or purpose of anything government says or does, a belief that what’s-in-it-for-me is the ruling ethos among any who get a sniff at public office and power, that those who lead will grab, steal, manipulate all systems and institutions, in order to amass and retain wealth, power and privileges. Truly a dispiriting moment of low expectations, and even lower national self-belief and self-confidence.”

And yet, Ngumi insists, good, positive things are happening all around us. Innovation in the digital and wider IT space. An emerging rediscovery of MSMEs’ potential. A Covid-induced increasing confidence that we actually can manufacture things that we had always assumed had to be imported.

A tentative start, again Covid-induced, to tackling long standing problems such as cleaning up our towns, using initiatives like Kazi Mtaani. A laying down of infrastructure which, no matter how expensively acquired, is there, can be used. A fierce constitutionalism and sense of rights among the citizenry, who increasingly do not hesitate to assert their rights, including resorting to legal action. A growing willingness and determination to hold leaders to account at all levels.

In short, Ngumi is telling us that “Yes We Can”. But not if we don’t believe it. And for us to believe we can we must have a goal, a sense of purpose, a national ambition around which we can galvanise our energies, drive and ingenuity.

YES WE CAN

He doesn’t think “attaining middle income status by 20…” or suchlike will do it for us.

We’ll just yawn cynically, he believes. He would love for us to have a grand ambition, like leading an African Renaissance.

Thabo Mbeki tried that, to general continental indifference.

Obama beat us to Yes We Can. And yet Ngumi feels we need a spark to release all these fierce energies and drive that we have in great abundance, to turn these positively outward towards national goals.

Ngumi concluded his Whatsapp by asking for ideas, and so – with his permission – that’s how I close… for now. Ideas please, readers!