Kenya Kwanza has clearly lost narrative wars

It is now clear that the Kenya Kwanza administration has completely lost the war of narratives about its performance. Narratives matter for creating common knowledge about the true state of the world.

For example, if everyone believes that an administration cares about their personal well-being, they are likely to give public officials the benefit of the doubt and patiently try to do their part in making administration policies work.

However, if the belief is that an administration is failing or that its leadership does not care about the welfare of the public, then people will try to undercut at every turn.  Under these conditions, policy implementation becomes much harder and is always met with high levels of public suspicion. Furthermore, the public tends to extend little grace to public officials. This explains the caustic nature of public discourse we are currently witnessing.  What explains the loss of the narrative wars? Three main answers come to mind. First, the most important driver has been the inability of the Kenya Kwanza administration to make any of their flagship initiatives work.

Industrial parks flopped. The healthcare financing reforms have been a shambles. The education sector is on its knees. Security is deteriorating, with state security forces implicated in alleged abductions and extra-judicial murders.

After two years, the only unambiguous achievement of the administration has been the avoidance of default and stabilisation of important macroeconomic conditions – outcomes that are hard to sell politically to the general public when households are still feeling the effects of inflation and poor public services.

Second, the government does not have a clear communication strategy to accompany its policy implementation. It boggles the mind why State House cannot hire professionals to guide its policy communication and mobilisation of public.

It turns out that the skillsets required to play the dark arts of campaign communication are not readily transferable to the domains of policy and everyday governance. Instead of rationalisation, the administration’s response has been to proliferate communication departments that relay conflicting messages and contribute to further erosion of public trust.

Finally, the administration’s actions have not been ideal. Alleged abductions of critics, the efforts to ethnicise the discourse on its performance, and the feeling that the administration prioritises deals over policy outcomes have eviscerated public trust. To rebuild trust, the administration must get back to the basics of making policy work and having its senior officials model a public morality that honours our implied social contract. 

The writer is a professor at Georgetown University