I'm sorry Ndii felt unable to honour government invitation

No good deed goes unpunished, a somewhat rueful proverb tells us. There is some wisdom in it; a lesson I drew from reading David Ndii’s column in the Saturday Nation.

Mr Ndii claims that he was not invited to last Tuesday’s State House Summit on Governance, Anti-Corruption and Accountability in the manner to which he has become accustomed.

It may be useful to set the record straight, and to make clear that the Summit was an honest attempt to grapple with the complexities of governance and corruption in Kenya.

First, the core of Mr Ndii’s complaint is that he was a key invitee, in which capacity he expected personal phone calls from the Head of the Public Service, as well as the State House Spokesperson, each of them personally asking him to attend, and explaining to him what exactly he would be asked to do. 

I am afraid he has wildly overestimated his importance. Every participant is just as important. He was invited as a participant and a contributor, as his letter of invitation indicated. The Head of the Public Service cannot be expected to personally call each participant, especially when, as in this case, there were more than 200 invitees. That would be a waste of time. Rather, it saves everyone time to send letters to participants, informing them of the invitation, and giving them details of the event. It is simply not feasible to call so many people individually.

FEW PEOPLE

One also wonders at the extent of this sense of entitlement. There can be few people who, once invited to a serious public function by a formal letter, would refuse to attend because they think it beneath them to attend unless personally called by the Head of the Public Service. Suffice it to say that other people – men and women who have made larger contributions to Kenya’s public life than Mr Ndii – do not think so highly of themselves, and were happy to attend without a personal phone call from the Head of the Public Service – and not just attend but get to contribute. As these invitees servants showed, the Kenyan way is to honour a request to dialogue.

Mr Ndii maintains that he wants serious, civil conversation about Kenya’s governance challenges. He then proceeds to insult and demean those who issued an invitation to such an engagement in good faith; before accusing senior government officials of forgery, fraudulent accounting, and misleading the public. Naturally, no regard is given to adducing evidence to back for these claims – a mode of argument into which Mr Ndii has fallen more than once. It is mischievous and worse still cowardice in no small part.

KENYAN COURTESY

For those who responded with proper Kenyan courtesy to the invitation, what did we learn? We learned that interrogating the challenges and status of the war on corruption in a Summit, where we can talk directly to each other, is substantially more engaging and useful than a typical column – even a good column. Viewers and participants alike saw, quite clearly, there was a weak link in the Judiciary: that corruption cases have been needlessly tied up there, and that it is time for the Judiciary to step up to the plate, and get some convictions.

We also learned how seriously several arms of government take their legal and constitutional obligations. That is why we do not fight corruption by precipitate action outside the law, even though that might temporarily satisfy some of this government’s critics. Rather, Kenya does better if we fight corruption within the law, following appropriate legal procedure. Of necessity, that will take longer than the route preferred by some of our critics who have been known to write admiring articles about a well-known leader whose fight against corruption is not bound by legal or institutional imperatives. But Kenya is too advanced a nation – and we have fought too long for our new Constitution – to do anything other than follow the law, however frustrating that might seem in the short term.

AUTOMATION’S SUCCESS

Another point that emerged is the success of automation in the fight against corruption. The fewer people there are doing a particular job, then, generally, the fewer opportunities for graft. That is one reason why there has been such a warm public response to our attempts to digitise government services, the better to eliminate opportunities for theft. These efforts will continue, and we expect them to become even more important in the months and years to come. 

For now, it is tolerably clear, I think, that Mr Ndii is uninterested in calm discussion of Kenya’s governance challenges. That, in fact, is exactly what happened at the Governance Summit: senior government officials, diplomats, representatives from business and the private sector, specialists in governance, as well as ordinary Kenyans, had a frank and fruitful discussion about some of the most serious problems in Kenya’s public life. I am sorry that Mr Ndii felt unable to honour our invitation, but in the end, much was achieved in spite of this. 

Let me close by thanking all those who came, and whose participation enriched our deliberations, and strengthened the war on corruption.

Peter Kariuki is a governance adviser in the presidency.