If there's incompetence in Government, the buck stops at Ruto's desk in State House

In leadership, as in management and sports, you do not change a winning side. Chancy experiments can be costly. Put differently, Americans  say, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

One of President William Ruto’s biggest headaches remains the need to fix his government. Two and a half years down the line, he is still experimenting with finding an astute formula for a competent government that also ticks all other correct boxes.  The other boxes include ethnic balance, cronyism and personal loyalties, as well as commercial and business interests. Accordingly, Cabinet reshuffles and changes in Principal Secretary portfolios are the pesky order of the presidential day. They now include weaving in elements of the Opposition, complete with their captain, in a mangy dog formation. 

Way ahead of last July’s dismissal of the entire Cabinet in the wake of Gen-Z uprisings, President Ruto raised the red flag on Kenya’s highest council. Speaking on the occasion of signing of performance contracts at State House, Nairobi, the President told his people that something was grossly wrong with their performance.

“The moment I know more than you in your ministry, then you must begin to understand that something is very wrong,” the President told his Cabinet Secretaries. 

He reminded them that they were supposed to be his advisors,and not the other way round.

“By the Constitution, you are supposed to advise me. Explain to me how you are going to advise me if you have less information than I have. Who is going to advise whom?  I call many PSs and I ask them, ‘What is going on here?.’ They have no clue. And this is your department. That is the job that you have. You are not a messenger, you are not a security person, you are not a photographer; you are not a watchman,  you are the PS, or the Minister. And the job of the PS or the Minister, you don’t know. Or you don’t have information. How do you run a ministry or a department, or a parastatal if you have no information?”

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The President described the situation in the government at the time as “the greatest height of incompetence.”  He accused his appointees of not reading notes and briefs on their desks.

“There are a lot of briefs from all manner of places. Read! I take time myself to read. It is the only way you can have the correct information for you to make the right decisions.”

These memories flow back, in the wake of President Ruto’s accusation these past few days of Justin Bedan Njoka Muturi of incompetence when he served as his first Attorney General. Ruto has since dismissed Muturi from the portfolio of Public Service, which he appointed him to in July last year, in a Cabinet recovery exercise following the Gen-Z protests of June.

The converse in these conversations is the question of how much consultation there is in the Ruto government. Does the President give premium time to his Cabinet and Principal secretaries to advise him? Does he create the right atmosphere for candid advice on sensitive matters, or does he get irritable and restless when his auxiliaries begin tabling uncomfortable matters? Does he have favourites whose counsel is more valued than the rest? How does the “homeboys” phenomenon feature in the decisions made by his government? And does he prefer a specific kind of advice that will cheer  him up?

These questions, and other allied concerns, are at the core of the matter of competence in the performance of any government. Is the Ruto government intentionally conscious of these primary concerns in driving competent entities?

Competence itself begins at the very top, where the captain sits. In sports, as in management, when it is not working, they will first fix the manager, and next the skipper. In June 2013 David Moyes succeeded the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson as the manager at Manchester United Football Club. In April 2014, he was sacked because of the English Premier League legends’ poor performance. They turned out in position seven at the end of the season. Many others have seen the door elsewhere. In leadership and management, as in sports, it is not about teams of champions, it is about champion teams. Has President Ruto been fashioning together teams of champions, instead of champion teams? 

A team of champions boasts of a galaxy of celebrities with superclass individual talent and ability. These assets, however, are not harnessed for purposes of building a strong united team. Everyone roves around in their own starry space. They shine for a few moments in futile efforts that lead to nothing. The champion team, on the other hand, strings itself into one compact entity that works together with a sense of purpose, vision and mission. The performance of the Ruto Cabinets has been way below champion teams, and often even below what could pass for teams of champions with individual talents and showmanship. They have been more like communities of hunters of personal fortune, comprising people who get jolted whenever the call of duty is mentioned. For, they are in the government on a different mission altogether.

Muturi’s dismissal from the Ruto government has been building up for some time. What is surprising is that he did not go sooner, whether through resigning, or being shown the door. In July last year, Ruto appointed a team to probe the public debt, an assignment that rests squarely with the Auditor General. When the courts quashed the appointment, Muturi blamed the misadventure on President Ruto. “I was never consulted,” he told the media. 

And yet he retreated so quickly. He accused the media of misquoting him. He threatened to take legal action. Did his backpedalling point to strong political headwinds that he ran into with his boss, following this pronouncement? Yet, this was not even the first time Muturi was raising concern on the side-lining of the AG’s office in making critical decisions in high places. 

In February 2024, Muturi told Parliament that appointments of senior officers and a number of Bills in Parliament had been done without his office being consulted. He accused the Public Service Commission (PSC) of appointing senior public servants without consulting the AG’s office. The net effect of this was the delinking of the AG’s office from the PSC, a move that has since lifted the lid to the possibility that the PSC could soon be cannibalized into a useless shell, if a Bill now before Parliament is enacted into law. 

Cannibalization of the PSC is itself a pointer to incompetence in high places, and the desire to whittle down the powers of independent constitutional entities that are calling an otherwise incompetent government back to order. The incompetence begins with placing square pegs into round holes by the appointing authority. President Ruto’s initial Cabinet had individuals who sounded like Alice in Wonderland when they appeared before Parliament for vetting. Rather than answer the questions that were put to them, some literally burst into tears. They bemoaned their “disadvantaged upbringing.” But they said nothing about their fit for use in the assignments before them. The call to office was a matter of balancing tribal equations and paying off political debts to individuals who had helped the president during his campaign for office. Many more of these misfits found their way to boards of semi-autonomous government agencies (SAGAs), as chairs or board members. 

Most have had no idea of what the entities they oversee as board directors are supposed to do. They arrived at the SAGAs with the eagerness of the beaver, their sights cast on the budgets, and on the tendering processes. They have been overbearing, looking not at how to make the SAGAs more efficient, but rather at how to participate in the procurement processes. They demand permanent office space for themselves, officials vehicles and drivers, security, and regular stipends. In the absence of these facilities, they push for meetings outside the regulated four meetings per annum, with hefty sitting allowances, trips, and other avenues of income generation. 

But, the most vital consideration remains tendering and procurement. It is also the weakest link in government, and the mother of incompetence. For, persons are appointed not because they bring any merit to the assignment, but rather that they are good for use. Hence, as in the matters complained of by Muturi, a cabinet secretary will read in the Kenya Government Gazette that he or she has made certain senior level appointments to a SAGA under their watch. Such a CS may be heard to wonder aloud, “Oh, so they have made these appointments?” 

But, the big irony is that the appointment was signed off by the same CS, who did not know that the appointment was being made. The anatomy of creating incompetence in government gets better when the AG himself reads in the Government Gazette, for the first time, things that he was unaware of. While anybody can pay for a notice and place it in the Kenya Gazette, just like in any commercial publication, the import of conformance with the Law requires that the AG’s office is the entity to sign off all government notices that are placed in the gazette, It is accordingly a matter of primary worry that some notices may have been published by bypassing both the cabinet secretaries and the AG. Who published them?

Yet, as President Ruto pointed out at the August 2023 address to the Cabinet, there are senior career public servants who understand only too well how the government should work. They range from secretaries of administration at the top, to a wide range of directorates in different State departments. The tragedy is that when the political class arrives in the corridors of government, these officers have to lie low. They have seen it all under a succession of political barracudas. They have been bullied from different directions, often needing to respond to conflicting competing interests. Their focus remains on saving their skin, up to the end of a particular tenure, when they must again brace themselves for a new wave of captains from the Executive. The outcome can only be incompetence in public duty. 

Moreover, the incompetence in public service brings to the fore a telling contradiction in performance expectations. If the expected performance outputs are the measure of competence, you will often have conflict between what the appointed official understands to be his or her role, on the one hand, and what the public expects. Similarly, there has been conflict between what the appointing authority expects, and what the officer understands. In the case of Justin Muturi, he understood that he had been appointed as Attorney General, to serve as Chief Legal Advisor to the President and to the government. What Muturi failed to take note of was that national CEOs often do not want their chief legal advisors to tell them that what they are doing is unlawful. Rather, they expect the AG to show them how to beat the law. 

If the AG keeps telling the boss that the things he is doing, or wishes to do, are unconstitutional and should not, therefore, be done, he begins walking on the path of incompetence. And that is how he will find himself on the high road out of government. There was the housing levy matter, for example, when the AG advised KRA not to deduct the housing levy. Then there was the matter of sending Kenya Police Officers to Haiti. Once again, Muturi distanced himself from the decision. In both cases, as in many others, the president expected the AG to explain away the decision of the government. But the AG elected to follow the straight and narrow legal path. 

Two questions remain, first, were not many laws made under the hawk-eyed Muturi that were eventually thrown out by the courts, especially when he served as Speaker of the National Assembly? So how was this even possible? Second, what are the political ramifications of these incompetence charges and what Kenyans should expect? President Ruto, clad in religious regalia, told a sacred gathering in the ended week that he now has a competent AG. But what are the president’s expectations of this competent AG? Will he circumnavigate this AG the way Muturi claims he was circumvented? If he does, the courts will again throw out his actions. A pliant Parliament will enact user-friendly laws that will be declared unconstitutional, if taken to Court. That kind of competence is not very helpful, in the long run. To his disadvantage, when he served as Speaker, Muturi presided over at least 23 Acts of Parliament that the High Court declared unconstitutional. Uhuru Kenyatta was then the President. Whether he is being duplicitous by charging now that he will follow the law, or whether his new stand is an indication of growth and development, will be difficult to tell. It suffices to say, however, that competence in circumventing the law is a perverted kind of competence. Kenyans may want to hope that it is not that kind of competence that President Ruto has found in his new AG. 

State House overreach is nothing new, and Ikulu will always seek to have its own way. Those appointed by Ikulu will want to find delicate ways of balancing between the law and political expediency. Under the Ruto tenure so far, there have been several believable narratives of CSs who have resigned due to Ikulu overreach, but their resignations were rejected, as they were inopportune. Prof. Njuguna Ndung’u, at the National Treasury, stands out. Impeccable sources have it that he resigned no less than three times, but was compelled to stay on for the sake of the right optics. In the end, when it was expedient that ministers should be sacked on grounds of incompetence, the axe descended on him, alongside the rest of his colleagues, except the prime CS, Musalia Mudavadi, and the then DP, Rigathi Gachagua. 

Of Ruto’s original Cabinet, it is only Mudavadi who has never been sacked, Gachagua having been eventually impeached on 08 October last year. The implication is that besides Ruto, Mudavadi has been the only other competent member of  that Cabinet. Yet, even after sacking these incompetent persons, President Ruto still finds room to recycle the incompetent ones, by appointing them into other offices. Muturi was himself recycled from the AG’s  office to Public Service. Many others have been appointed to foreign missions. It is not clear if the message is that the new spaces are the ones in which incompetence is allowed or what, exactly, the president is communicating. 

Politically, Kenyans continue to see a government that is incompetent, and one whose captain is perpetually tinkering with the parts, unable to correct and fix them. The 33rd American president, Harry Truman, famously had a plaque on his desk with the words, “The buck stops here.” Truman was a decisive and resolute individual, who played on the world stage towards the end of World War II. The plaque on his desk affirmed his belief that he was ultimately responsible for the decisions, actions and outcomes in his government.

 In a democracy the president, or prime minister, appoints the people who will work for him. If they turn out to be useless, only two questions will count. First, is “useless for what purpose?” If they were useless for meeting extra-legal ends, or illegal ends, then the tag of uselessness is wrongly placed. Second, if they are truly useless, then the appointing authority will first need to remove the log that sits in its own eye. Meanwhile, JBN Muturi can now go back to the political drawing board. He goes there with a lot of lethal ammunition. It is of little wonder that Kenyans are hearing from very unlikely militaristic circles that they should not say things like, “Ruto must go.” 

Dr Muluka is a political commentator