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Michael Hopkins

A few years ago I was walking by the poolside at the Muthaiga Country Club to my table when I spotted my dear friend Bob Munro, now sadly passed away. He was there with his family and with his friend Michael Hopkins, to whom he introduced me. Since then Michael and I became close friends as well, but equally sadly he too passed away just recently, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday.

For the last few years Michael had been living part of his time in Malindi, part in Nairobi and part in France near the Swiss border, in each location continuing to pursue his passion for Corporate Social Responsibility, where he had been a pioneer in developing sustainable frameworks. He’d written numerous books on the subject, including periodic updates, and he was also a visiting professor at many universities, including Management University Africa here in Nairobi. He’d also written a series of blogs condemning the awfulness of Brexit, which he later collected into a book called Brrrexit!.

Professor Hopkins was greatly in demand for interacting with students on the highly topical subject of sustainability, as well as with corporates, and this around Europe, in India and Mauritius, and elsewhere. He was also in demand with me, as he became my guide on CSR and sustainability, plus the closely related ESG issues – on Environment, Social and Governance.

I particularly admired him for his “systems thinking”, urging those with whom he interacted to integrate their ESG strategies with their overall ones. And another point he liked to make was not to confine CSR activity to the for-profit private sector but also to not-for-profits and to the public sector. Great thoughts! Plus to have sufficient but not excessive regulations for it all.

I quoted him in a couple of my articles on such subjects in this column, and we participated in a joint book launch at the Westgate bookshop, him with his CSR volume, taking it “From the Margins to the Mainstream” in an uncomplicated way, and me with a collection of my articles on ESG.

Michael and I linked up in several other related ways too. He introduced me to Prof. Mike Saks, a UK colleague of his who also specialised in such fields, and the three of us co-founded the UK-centred International Responsible Leadership organisation, which promotes such kind of leadership around the world.

Now Prof. Hopkins may have been a much-respected academic in his field, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a jolly fellow, whose laughter so often filled the room. Michael was a joker, not least about himself, and he and I would always have such a happy time together, whether just on the phone or in person.

His jolliness, his very firm values and his areas of interest also led me to introduce him to my Rotary Club of Nairobi, where he would nudge us into building sustainability into our community projects. Not surprisingly, his commonest phrases were to “treat others the way you want them to treat you,” and to “treat all key stakeholders responsibly”, very aligned with Rotary thinking.

Michael became a very popular member, often staying behind after our weekly lunch meetings to chat further with a few members. And when he passed away a great sense of sadness swept over the club. Just recently Rosemary Wahome, herself in the sustainability business, asked me if I’ve thought about how to honour Michael’s contributions to sustainability, and it immediately occurred to me to propose a sustainability award in his memory to our Rotary Club. Discussions on this are now under way.

On 16th November – Michael’s 80th birthday – a memorial service was held in Malindi to celebrate Michael’s life, with his son William and daughter Eve present. And following this his cremated remains were carried out on a boat and sprinkled into the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately I couldn’t be there to eulogise my buddy Michael, but happily I have this opportunity to write about him.

We will continue learning from Prof Hopkins about CSR and sustainability by reading his writing and remembering what he taught us, and it will keep reminding us of his permanently on-display sense of humour and his jolly laughter.

Confronting inequality through volunteering

I’ve been reading an interesting 2004 book, From Me to We, by Craig and Marc Kielburger, two brothers who were brought up in a middle-class American home, headed for a normal progression through higher education and into well-paying jobs. But while still in their teens they both were encouraged to fly to the poorest, most miserable Asian environments to see for themselves the dramatic contrast between their lives and the lives of those who struggle in the meanest of slums, including through offering their young children as sources of brutal labour.

It was an eye-opener for them, as the norm in backgrounds such as theirs is to be unaware of the extent of the contrast between their comfortable lives and the awful existence of the large number of poor people, many homeless and with insufficient money for clothes or even food. These are the excessive inequalities we experience these days, including and not least here in Kenya.

The Asian visits transformed the lives of the two brothers, leading them to dedicate themselves to helping the needy around the world. Even before reaching their twenties their ‘Free the Children’ NGO grew to global prominence, as they encouraged people to seek other than just money and power, and to volunteer to help others… together, as ‘We’.

Reading the book I immediately thought of my long association with Rotary, nearly fifty years now. For Rotary, like other service organisations, is a great example of moving from “Me” to “We”, bringing volunteer members of individual clubs together with each other so as to make a disproportionately greater impact on our surrounding communities. Then also having clubs from around the country, the region and globally collaborate, and partnering with other complementary partners too.

My next thought was how other volunteers have been brought together through the development of Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, this within the organisations where they work. CSR activity began to be formalised in the 1950s, and it has gathered great momentum more recently, with the full expectation that businesses should please stakeholders beyond only shareholders, including for the wellbeing of the greater society.

Now CSR projects are being challenged to align themselves with the UN’s 17 Strategic Development Goals (SDGs), which highlight the connection between the environmental, social and governance elements of sustainability. What a great way to educate so many people at so many levels in the private sector (it’s time for this to spread to public sector and to NGOs) so they are not only aware of the bigger picture of universal wellbeing, but so they actively participate in ways of making a difference.

Here they now are, volunteering within their day-jobs, helping to improve the lives of the under-privileged, whether by meeting urgent short-term needs such as providing food and shelter; or by building schools, clinics and other needed services; or by adopting an institution or a whole village. Another area that I have seen is vitally important for volunteering is by raising the level of those with great potential that is not being otherwise nurtured of whom are so many, so they have a chance of fulfilling their potential and indeed then in turn helping others.

It is by being personally exposed to the circumstances under which the most deprived around us live, and then by becoming active in improving their lot, that societies around the world will become more caring. Individuals contributing to such programmes will make new decisions about their values and how they want to live, and redefine their goals and the legacy they wish to leave behind them. Above all, the Kielburgers found, this broadening of the scope of one’s life through volunteering leads one to redefine the meaning of one’s life and what it is that makes one successful and happy.

Here we’re talking about the choice between being totally devoted to one’s career success, accumulating fancy titles and fancy cars on the one hand, and on the other hand balancing this with investing part of one’s time helping others.

In Kenya the whole idea of Harambee fund-raisers are meant to achieve such sharing within communities. Unfortunately though, too often they just became ways for politicians and other people of influence to enhance their personal popularity. Oh to purify that Harambee spirit! Yet we also have many genuine helpers of the needy here, starting at a young age with community projects engaged in by schools.

So if you are a volunteer in some capacity with a “We” group, feel good about it and attract others to join you. And as parents and generally as elders, promote the concept. We need as much as possible of this caring mindset to dilute the huge inequalities in our society.

Influencers

Do you describe yourself as an influencer? I mainly mean this in the context of leadership, as there are other places and ways of influencing – including through writing articles like this. In leadership you are responsible for the behaviour and performance of others, and the question is to what extent and how do you influence those for whom you are responsible.

Autocratic leaders influence their subordinates by providing direction and instructions, insisting on compliance, with rewards for such behaviour and penalties for any deviation. It’s an “efficient” way of leading, as no time is “wasted” on consultation… which delays decision-making.

On the other hand, leaders who connect rather than control as they interact with their staff accept that as influencers rather than direction-givers they must invest time in persuading them to align with whatever it is they want to achieve, and how. This first requires identifying the big picture, the overall purpose, the “why”, of what they should all be up to, and having them buy into it. Also to attract new people who align with that picture, and to retain those already with them.

Then comes how that purpose can be fulfilled. Different functions, different people, will have different perspectives – including you. So how do you influence consensus-building – so different from simple instruction-giving? Let me start with the need to listen. As Stephen Covey put it, “seek to understand before you seek to be understood”. It is only if you know where everyone is coming from that you will know how to bring them together.

What if some resist what you are proposing, making it hard for you to influence them? What if it involves transformative change that disrupts organisational structure and individual comfort? Change is the norm these days, and one has to work with it whether it feels comfortable or not, and indeed even it one perceives oneself as a “loser” as a result… at least in the short term.

How do you influence the adoption of uncomfortable change, replacing anxiety by excitement, pessimism by optimism? This takes us back to the big picture, to the consequences of not changing, which would jeopardise the sustainability of the business. In any organisation there will be a spectrum from the very influenceable characters to the totally uninfluenceable ones, and it’s the influenceables with whom you must first engage, to help them become champions of the new scene. And the performance management system must recognise and further motivate them appropriately, while helping the resisters to develop a more positive mindset.

Earlier I mentioned listening, and this implies conversation, where everyone has an opportunity to be influenced and to influence. This in a culture of openness, where people are relaxed about expressing themselves, trusting that they will be listened to with respect. There must be a spirit of give and take – including from you, often in a mediation role – so that everyone ends up owning the outcome of the engagement.

A brilliant way of handling all this is through Kaizen, the Japanese-initiated approach to inclusiveness where leaders have a much easier time bringing people together. I’ve seen it in action here, where staff at all levels are actively involved in bringing about high performance, not least through continuous improvement and waste reduction. You influence the “why” and the “where”, and the staff support with the “how”.

What about influencing yourself? Where does your behaviour need to change? How will you phase out habits that may have once worked but that are now counterproductive? Can you have constructive conversations with yourself, perhaps enhanced by a coach, to let go of some of your past styles and adopt new ones? A coach can also work with you to help you become a stronger influencer of others, not least by opening you up to softer ways of engaging.

Before closing I do want to mention other kinds of influencing. First, the contrast between the lecturer and the facilitator, where it is the facilitator, through interactivity, who is more likely to influence. This is because facilitators ask more than tell, engaging with their participants rather than just talking at an audience.

Then, major institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. Having worked with them over the years, I know that much of what they do is to influence quietly behind the scenes, without taking either credit or blame. Finally in this category let me mention NCIC, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, much of whose work is conflict resolution and peace-building, again quietly. Here the bulldog does not need teeth, but rather the influencing skills of mediation. Even in their other more public work, they influence in partnership with other institutions, ones that provide the needed teeth.

ChatGPT on Adam Grant

Having lost an article I’d written about three of Adam Grant’s books, I asked an AI-ologist friend to find it in my laptop. Unfortunately he couldn’t, so instead he kindly asked ChatCPT to write it on my behalf. He fed thirty of my past columns into the app so it could get a feel for my style, and then gave it this prompt: “Extract the style of Mike Eldon from the document and use it to analyse the books of Adam Grant listed above.” Here’s what emerged with the usual AI speed…

On Being Bold, Humble, and Human: Adam Grant’s Lessons for Kenya Today

In my years of working with Kenyan leaders, teachers, youth groups, and executives – from Kisumu to Kilifi – I’ve often found myself returning to one quiet question: Can kindness survive the pressures of performance? Can empathy and ambition walk together? Adam Grant seems to think so. And as I reflect on his ideas, I find echoes of our local struggles, and, our quiet triumphs.

Take for example the idea that we should learn to “think again” – to unlearn, to remain curious, to admit we might be wrong. This, I find, is deeply counter-cultural in many Kenyan institutions, where hierarchy can freeze dialogue and where a title sometimes carries more weight than an idea. But I’ve also seen young professionals in Nairobi tech hubs and rural community organizations challenge outdated assumptions, ask better questions, and surprise even themselves. As Grant reminds us: intellectual humility isn’t weakness—it’s wisdom.

Then there’s the myth of raw talent. In a country where exam results define futures and where brilliance is often measured by a grade, Grant’s notion of hidden potential is both refreshing and liberating. He tells us that coachability, not credentials, is the true predictor of greatness. And indeed, I’ve witnessed it – an overlooked intern in a county office who becomes an indispensable problem-solver; a high school dropout in Kakamega who leads her peers in microenterprise. What they needed wasn’t a head start. It was someone to believe in their stretch.

But belief isn’t enough – we must also act. In Give and Take, Grant distinguishes between takers, matchers, and givers. I thought about this as I mentored a young NGO leader struggling with burnout. She was giving too much. Yet, Grant reminds us, being a giver isn’t about being a martyr—it’s about sustainable service. In Kenya, where communal responsibility often collides with individual limits, this is a vital lesson. Generosity needs boundaries. Philanthropy needs self-care.

One of Grant’s most profound collaborations is Option B, which speaks to resilience after tragedy. And here, we need not look far. From post-election trauma to pandemic loss, Kenyans carry many invisible wounds. I think of teachers who show up after personal grief, boda boda riders who persist after injury, single mothers in Mathare who rise each day with quiet strength. Option B gives us language for their courage and, more importantly, tools for healing. In it, Grant and Sheryl Sandberg offer what I would call structured empathy—a kind of practical compassion we need more of in our workplaces and homes.

Finally, Originals is perhaps the most Kenyan of all the books—though not in the way you might think. We are a deeply creative people. From handmade jikos to high-tech startups, we are natural innovators. But what Grant does is dignify the slow-burning rebel, the one who doubts before they disrupt. He teaches us that being original isn’t about being loud—it’s about being committed. This lesson could guide many a changemaker in our counties and ministries.

Adam Grant is not writing for Kenyans, and yet, his work reads like a mirror. It reflects our potential, our mistakes, our hopes. It challenges us to lead without ego, to mentor without condescension, to grieve without shame, and to grow without limits.

What I take from Grant, and what I hope others do too, is this: Success isn’t what you have; it’s what you share. Leadership isn’t dominance; it’s dialogue. Progress isn’t perfection; it’s permission—to rethink, relearn, and rise again.

In Kenya today—where we hunger for ethical leadership, where our youth brim with restless energy, and where communities demand both dignity and development – Grant’s work reminds us to remain bold enough to speak, humble enough to listen, and human enough to feel.

So there it is – very thoughtful and articulate, although not fully a reflection of my style. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have another go at the topic myself, using my human intelligence.

Shell report 1967

Going through my archives, I came across a report from November 1967 produced by Shell that my father Bruno had passed down to me. At that time he was Shell’s Head of Worldwide Management Training, based in London, and this fascinating document must have acted as a powerful guide to him and his colleagues.

What was I up to at that time, now nearly half a century ago? A couple of months earlier I had obtained my undergraduate degree and I had just joined the British computer multinational that ten years later brought me here.

Here’s how Shell’s Group Personnel Coordinator (as such folk were called then) H.W. Atcherley opened his foreword to the report:

“We talk a great deal these days, and necessarily so, about more effective utilisation of manpower. In the course of this dialogue we will probably concede that management knowledge of motivation, attitudes and other factors which influence staff morale, job performance and personal satisfaction lags some way behind knowledge of the technical, financial and other aspects of the business.”

He went on to appreciate the increasing role being played by social scientists in building up a body of knowledge about human behaviour and the requirements for organising people to carry out a task. This knowledge was largely unfamiliar within the company, and so they brought in Dr. Hollis Peter to design and carry out a survey.

Atcherley then mentioned their reference to Douglas McGregor’s in his The Human Side of Enterprise, and also to the work of an MIT colleague of McGregor’s, Prof. Edgar H. Schein. These were the founding gurus of culture in the workplace and of organisational development, and I know they were a great influence on how my father put his management development programmes together.

I was delighted to see reference to one of my favourite frameworks, Blake and Mouton’s Management Grid, where they drew up a matrix between managers who focused on tasks versus those who focused on people – where the ideal of course is that it should not be either one or the other but both.

Survey participants were selected from 25 countries around the world (with over half of them expatriates), and included ones from the head-office functions in London and The Hague.

The following statements were laid out, for them to agree or disagree with:

  1. Leadership skills can be acquired by most people, regardless of their inborn traits and abilities.
  2. Generally speaking, people prefer to be directed, and wish to avoid responsibility.
  3. The use of rewards and penalties is not the best way to get subordinates to do their work.
  4. A good leader should give detailed and complete instructions to his subordinates, rather than depending on their initiative to work out the details.
  5. If subordinates cannot influence their superiors, then they lose some influence on them.
  6. Group goal setting offers advantages that cannot be obtained by individual goal setting.
  7. A superior should give his subordinates only that information that is necessary for them to do their immediate task.
  8. The superior’s authority over his subordinates is primarily economic.

It also identified four different management styles from among which the respondents were invited to select their preferred one: autocratic, paternalistic, consultative and participative. Sounds familiar?

I was introduced to these emerging management theories in an academic context when I was going through my Sloan Masters programme in the mid-seventies at the London Business School, and my whole point here – not for the first time in this column – is to provide an objective time-perspective on the evolution of management knowledge over the years. In particular to stress that whereas it is so commonly assumed that our preferred contemporary styles only emerged in this 21st century, that is clearly not the case – at least not for ahead-of-the-game organisations like Shell.

As I read through the report, I was not surprised to see that explicitly only men were involved, 100%. No mention of women at all. I also noted that computers were just entering the scene, with reference to this emerging technology.

I could write much more about the contents and conclusions of the survey. But suffice it to say that it made a big impact on me, recognising that when I was still in my twenties there were management thinkers and doers who would have fitted into today’s organisations as well as their succeeding generation counterparts.

I hope that what I have selected here makes you also reflect on the development of knowledge flows over time, and on how to get a feel for the relationship between an organisation and its staff.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

I’ve been reading an article by Carmine Gallo from the January 2020 edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) about how the best CEOs are the ones who know they can improve their skills further, not least their communication skills, particularly through coaching.

Exactly what I have found in my work as a consultant.

The HBR article refers to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and explains it by stating that “people who are mediocre at certain things often think they are better than they actually are, and therefore fail to grow and improve. Great leaders, on the other hand, are great for a reason – they recognize their weaknesses and seek to get better.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is described as a “cognitive bias”, in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. It was first described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, and it has since become very well known. It is usually measured by comparing self-assessment with objective performance. For example, participants take a quiz and estimate their performance afterwards, and this is then compared to their actual results.

The original study focused on logical reasoning, grammar and social skills. But other studies have been conducted across a wide range of tasks, including from business, politics, medicine, driving, aviation, spatial memory, examinations in school and literacy, and they all found this over-estimation phenomenon exhibited by significant numbers. I should add that under-estimation is also present in some, leading to the “imposter syndrome” narrative, about which I have also written.

In earlier articles of mine here I have explored various aspects of this subject, including ones about the relationship between competence and confidence. Here, I have suggested, it is particularly politicians – in Kenya and around the world – whose confidence greatly exceeds their competence, and I selected former British Prime Minister Liz Truss as a fine example.

I quoted an article in the London Times about her, whose headline read: “Truss proves talent-free bluster isn’t just for men”. And its opening paragraph told us she broke one of the last glass ceilings – not as the first female Prime Minister in her country, for she was not, but as “the first woman to reach the highest office propelled by gargantuan self-belief alone”.

Why is there this bias to over-estimating one’s capabilities – or indeed in others to under-estimate them? The simple answer is lack of self-awareness. Such people lack an objective view of their strengths and weaknesses, and do not seek feedback from those with whom they interact to align their perceptions with reality. And who would be particularly well-placed to open them up to such gaps? Coaches.

Coaching is at the centre of my consulting work, where I seek to create a safe space in which the person being coached feels comfortable revealing vulnerabilities they had previously kept to themselves or had not even been aware of. My role is to help them identify areas for potential development, and then work with them to fill the gaps and so to be at their best.

What I have observed over the years is that those most in need of coaching are likely to least want it, imagining they just don’t need such support. They have a false sense of both competence and confidence that anyway would render them uncoachable. Those who reach out to me for support are overwhelmingly the ones who are already ahead of the game, as Gallo also found. They expect to be able to continuously improve and to do so, seeking ongoing feedback that it is actually happening.

So let me ask you how self-aware you are. Indeed, how sure are you that your perception of the extent of your self-awareness aligns with that of those around you, whether in the family, socially or professionally? At whatever age and level age you are, I urge you to carry out a “health-check” on where this stands between very low and very high.

Wherever you are, as Gallo and I have both found, there is most likely to be scope for being coached to rise further. There may be good coaches within your organisation, including your immediate boss, a board member or others, but there may be benefits to seeking an external coach – who will have no axe to grind within the organisation.

Finally, just as it’s helpful to be coached, surely you could and should also be a coach. Indeed contemporary leadership requires a coaching mindset as a key component in how one operates in that capacity.

Please seek a quiet space in which to reflect on what you have just read, and decide what action to take.

100 days of NARC – April 2003

Readers of this column will have seen my articles from the 1990 and the 1978 stories I came across in my archives, and today I’m writing about one from 2003. This is from a collection of articles in The East African titled “100 Days of NARC: East African CEOs Speak”, where mine was the lead one. Here’s how I started:

We expected so much; they led us to expect so much. Without Moi, everything would be possible; the new government was “unbwogable”. But that’s not real life. Real life has electioneering politicians paint Utopian visions that can never be achieved, even in a five-year period. Yet voters want to see results, instant results.

One must sympathise with the challenges faced by the new team. Ideally they might have wanted to take their time, acting in a poised and systematic fashion. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “protected” period in which to put the new team in place; find out the real situation on the ground; consult with all the stakeholders; drive a long-term vision, followed by objectives, strategies and plans; and only then get on with the implementation? Dream on. More so in this nanosecond age, when we expect instant action and instant results.

I went on to say that nowhere is this easy, mentioning the problems Tony Blair was facing at the time in trying to improve education and healthcare systems in Britain. “It’s not for want of trying,” I accepted, “but the capacity of ‘the system’ to resist change continues to be greater than that of reformers, however well-meaning or determined, to introduce it.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same, as since Blair’s time British governments have struggled more and more in these domains… including just now the new Labour government there, having to still deal with the pay claims and strikes, illegal immigrant flows and inadequate prison capacity, plus plus plus. And just look at how the Democrats and the Republicans in America were recently both painting their Utopian pictures for voters.

When our present government campaigned, like others they too promised an imminent heaven on earth. But when it came to implementing their manifesto, guess what? Heaven remained in its abode, while the citizens became disillusioned.

We must however accept that in the last few years it has become yet more challenging to fulfill electoral commitments, thanks to unpredictable global disruptions such as Covid and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that have adversely affected all economies.

What surprises me is that whether in the US, the UK or here, governments draw inadequate attention to these significant negative influences when either making their promises or later explaining why they have been unmet. Opposition politicians, the media and others of course stay silent on such mitigating factors.

Just as in my columns about the articles from 1978 about working well with customers, and from 2001 about leading with trust and consultation, here too there are elements of universality and timelessness. Like the phrase “campaigning in poetry and governing in prose” was not invented in Kenya.

I also called upon the NARC government to do a better job of communicating with us, not allowing the media to set the agenda. The problems between the NARC constituent parties brought easy copy to the media, I wrote, and this provided new scripts for the daily dose of melodrama they needed to keep their circulation healthy.

Later in my article I urged the NARC government to continue engaging actively with the private sector, as it is the engine of growth and creator of jobs… and the source of people who understand how to deliver high performance. The NARC leadership had already been doing this, resulting in the formation of the National Economic and Social Council and KEPSA.

I concluded by challenging private sector players to engage in the business of policy making and implementation. I didn’t say it there, but this includes some of us offering ourselves for positions in government. As did John Barorot, who for two years served as the Deputy Governor of Uashin Gishu before resigning not too long ago. He’d had all he could take of the tough political environment, and decided to throw in the towel and return to the more orderly world of the private sector.

So, my renewed plea to politicians: don’t get too far ahead with your pre-election selling without having the product to back it up. If elected, communicate effectively without continuing to over-promise. And for the rest of us, engage with those politicians to help them be connected to reality.

In school but not learning

In my article today I’m going to share with you how Prof. Olubayi Olubayi cried on my shoulder about the terribly low pass rate for the Kenya National Examinations Council’s (KNEC’s) Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations. It’s been bothering him for a long time, and he has now shown me the evidence which, with his academic scrupulousness, he has been compiling.

The KCSE pass mark is C+, which is usually less than 50% of the score in a subject. Prof Olubayi has been studying the KNEC website and media reports on the issue, and here’s the sad reality: since 2016, 80% of Kenyan children fail their KCSE after twelve years of schooling, meaning only two out of ten students pass. This with the exception of 2017 and 2018, when only one out of ten passed.

“Imagine a business that manufactures products,” Prof Olubayi lamented, “but where only two out of ten are good enough to sell. How long would such a business last?” That is the situation in Kenya, despite our hugely expensive public education system. The Government spends approximately 20% of its annual budget on this broken system, with the amount allocated for 2023/2024 being Shs.628 billion.

He went on to explain that there are many reasons for this mass failure – while adding that solutions do exist. Kenya has achieved near universal school attendance, but not universal learning, which reminded me of how the difference between diversity and inclusiveness has been described: diversity shows an invitation to the party, while inclusiveness sees you being invited to dance.

Prof. Olubayi concluded that the country is funding failure, where the victims are the majority of children, inevitably resulting in lowered development potential for the country.

If you ask Kenyans, whether well-educated professionals or ordinary citizens, to guess the pass rate for KCSE – as Prof Olubayi has been consistently doing – most suggest 70% or 80%. But as we see, the reality is very different. Sadly, most of the 20% who pass went to private primary schools or academies for their foundation primary schooling of Grades 1 to 3. Almost all the children of the truly poor, who cannot afford private primary schools, simply fail after attending school for twelve years. They attend, but they do not learn.

On January 20th 2023, the Nation ran the headline “The majority of 2022 KCSE students get low grades”. It was referring to the results that had just been officially announced by the CS Education, who stated that only 173,345 out of the 881,416 students who’d sat the Grade 12 (Form Four) national examination had passed with a C+ or above. This translates to a 20% pass rate, where C+ is the minimum Grade 12 national examination score that qualifies one to study for a degree programme at a university.

The low pass rate of only 22% for 2023 is the highest in the last 8 years. By comparison, in Mauritius – which has the best education system in Africa – the pass rate for the school certificate examination in 2022 was 78%. The pass rate in Malaysia is 55%. The percentage of students passing GCSE in the UK with a grade of C or higher was 73%, and those attaining a grade of A or A+ was 26% – which is higher than those passing with a C+ or higher in Kenya. In France, the pass rate for the baccalaureate is usually around 80%.

It is for these reasons that in 2012 Prof Olubayi created Kiwimbi, an NGO learning centre focused on interventions to raise the pass rates in primary and secondary schools in Kenya.

There they use the “Teach at the Right Level” (TaRL) method of the Indian NGO Pratham, in combination with “spaced-repetition”, a learning technique typically performed with flashcards, and they are obtaining excellent results. In the 2023 KCPE results one of the primary schools next to Kiwimbi in Amagoro had more than half the students score more than 300 points – a performance as good as that of our best private primary schools. The same methods are being deployed elsewhere in rural western Kenya, with similarly encouraging results in secondary schools.

Other interventions include persuading principals of selected boarding schools to respect the science of learning by allowing students to sleep for 8 hours, removing calculators, promoting general reading, and tutoring students in small groups.

Learn more about how kiwimbi operates and the impact it has been achieving by going to their website, www.kiwimbi.org. And beyond just browsing it, how can you help it to go to scale in its mission of transforming our pass rates? Surely together we can do so much better.

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”.