According to the latest Afrobarometer survey data, nearly 60 per cent of Kenyans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. And you cannot blame them. The government has failed to protect our children, from ongoing crises in boarding schools to disappearance of thousands of children over the last year.
General insecurity is on the rise, including use of gangs in our politics. Corruption and poor service delivery are as common as ever. Meanwhile, the economy continues to squeeze households ever tighter. Amid all this, public officials seem to be living in a different world. Taxes are rising. Wasteful spending, including lavish foreign trips and gatherings of delegations, is on the rise.
Arrogance is the order of the day – exemplified by how the government is handling the hosting an Ebola quarantine and treatment facility in Laikipia. Why does the government seem to be failing on multiple fronts?
The answer may lie in the fact that we have a government that is at its best when throwing a party or staging a public relations (PR) stunt. You see this in how senior officials spend all their time peddling campaign messages rather than doing their work. The dominance of the PR imperative in government has overridden concerns over actual service delivery.
Notice that after the deadly Utumishi fire incident, the government kicked into action to manage visuals of the tragedy, rather than console parents and signal that it was seriously working to address broader problems surfaced by the incident.
Now that the narrow framing of Utumishi is crumbling as the crises in schools spread, the government has resorted to stern statements that will do little to uncover and address fundamental problems ailing our boarding schools.
And why is PR the dominant mode of government action? For the simple reason that those in charge still have an election to win, and have to pretend to be working. Deep down, all involved must know the ship has lost course.
Deal-making and wanton theft have completely hollowed out the machinery of public service.
So instead of doing the boring work of figuring out what is ailing our schools, senior government officials would rather share the millionth version of pictures of the Dagoretti Junction overpass like it is some technological marvel that will increase the number of sufurias in Kenyan kitchens.
The problem, of course, with the PR approach is that it makes things worse in two ways. First, people hate being lied to or taken to be stupid.
The bigger the variance between the lived reality of Kenyans and the messaging, the angrier and more distrustful of government they will get. Second, it lulls public officials into thinking that PR is work. This, in turn, worsens the first problem.
There is no shortcut to doing the boring work of public service delivery. And the more government officials insist on only focusing on theft and deal-making, the more the problems we face as a country will compound and spiral out of control.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
