Governing a country of more than 50 million is hard work. The bulk of the job requires doing mostly boring maintenance tasks to ensure specific government functions are carried out effectively – like doing school inspections, certifying food producers, or ensuring health centres get their medicine supplies on time.
As if that is not enough, there is always the challenge of being confronted with demands for reforms to make things better. And to top it all, crises always arise that require their own forms of specialised attention.
Successful governments do a good job of balancing these three tasks. Importantly, such governments understand that the most important goal of any administration is to make sure the maintenance work is done well.
They invest a lot of time and effort in making sure that the proverbial trains run on time. Simply stated, they get the boring job done.
Less successful governments fall for the temptation to be distracted by shiny new projects or crises. While launching new projects may seem like a strong signal of effort, the public only cares if such projects are executed properly. Plus all new projects eventually become boring and in need of maintenance tasks.
The same goes for crises. After going through a crisis a government is expected to do the boring maintenance task required to prevent the same crisis from arising again.
Which is to say no government can sustain its legitimacy on the basis of appearing to do new things or diffusing crises. The only sure currency of legitimacy is doing the boring work of everyday maintenance.
Which brings us to the Kenya Kwanza administration and its case of acute reformitis. The administration is on a mission to reform everything but scarcely spends any time on maintenance. And so everything appears to be falling apart even as the leadership hops from one poorly implemented new project to the next.
The overarching lesson here is that if you are bad at the boring maintenance job, you will be equally bad at implementing new projects. Again, eventually, all government programmes require maintenance. Therefore, the best reforms are those designed with maintenance in mind.
The same goes for crises. The only way to avoid them is to do the hard boring work of everyday maintenance.
As the Kenya Kwanza administration enters its third year, its leadership must realise that the way to regain legitimacy is not through new projects or performative crisis management. Instead, they should focus on making things work.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
