#FRONTROW: What can the young blood in government really achieve?

The elevation of former Safaricom executive Nzioka Waita to State House Deputy Chief of Staff makes him one of the highest ranking youths in this administration.

The 38-year-old lawyer is now Joseph Kinyua’s second in command, and one of Kenya’s most powerful men, just a year after he left the private sector.

His role includes “delivery of flagship projects, performance contracting, managing coordination of the President’s fiscal priorities in liaison with the Treasury and oversight of State corporations”.

With that loaded portfolio, I don’t think Nzioka will be getting spare time for one of his hobbies – rallying. He will be lucky if he can sneak in a 9-hole game of golf before he has to run off to handle something.

He is not alone in the great big bureaucracy that is the  government. It’s almost as if there is a deliberate plan by President Uhuru Kenyatta or his advisers to people the public service with high-achieving young

people.

TRADITIONALLY RUN BY OLD GEEZERS

Because the government has traditionally been run by such old geezers that they could have dropped dead from old age (a few must have), even the appointment of 46-year-old Joe Mucheru as ICT secretary

is remarkable. He not only brings a superior happy socks game to Cabinet meetings, but is also a bona fide rock star on the technology scene, with unimpeachable credentials.

Now if only the ex-Googler could handle the hot, clueless mess that is Ezekiel Mutua and his shamelessly self-promotional fumbling at the Kenya Film Classification Board. But I digress.

An equally impressive appointment was that of Wilson Irungu Nyakera, 33, to the position of Principal Secretary in the State Department of Transport.

The Chelsea fan, and youngest PS, told an interviewer he is in the office by 6.30am and leaves at 9pm. He left a flourishing career in investment banking to serve people, just like he learnt under Starehe Boys’

founder, Geoffrey Griffin. There are a handful of other young men spread across senior jobs in the public service applying their private sector experience to a cantankerous public service.

Progress is hard to gauge and success even harder to measure because the government is a huge, unwieldy beast where just getting through a day can be an achievement in itself.

THRUST INTO THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Realistically, what can this small army of youthful leaders achieve in the government? They have been thrust into the belly of the beast in an age of rampant tenderpreneurship, “our turn to eat” mentality and a

general scarcity of principle. For all his faults, President Uhuru Kenyatta appears to have his heart in the right place with this move.

For a commander-in-chief who sometimes appears to be a hostage to a cartel within his own administration, I wonder what the brief here is exactly.

He famously had 100 staff in the procurement and finance departments in his own office transferred two years ago, presumably for corruption, instead of sending them home.

An opportunity to send a powerful message that graft would not be tolerated was thus quickly lost.

Mr Nyakera is right at the heart of a transport ministry previously bedevilled with grand larceny. The standard gauge railway has delivered a handsome payday for many a power broker and procurement officer.

The expansion works at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport  felled the previous managing director and several officials on claims of corruption.

Everywhere you look, there is blatant theft of public resources. The large-scale greed that has gone unchecked for decades is almost legal now. It’s almost as if people borrowed Gordon Gekko’s mantra,

“greed is good”,  in Wall Street  but appropriated it for the public sector.

“In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Even if this new crop of young managers tell the truth, as George Orwell said, the difference they can make is minuscule, and maybe

inconsequential. Hopefully, they won’t get tainted by the itchy-fingers syndrome that afflicts so many in the government.

They need superhuman strength to go against the tide and deliver on the Jubilee government’s promises to the country and battle the monster from within.

They have to deal with an established workforce much older than they are.

Only 11 per cent of civil servants are between 18 and 29, according to a report by the Inter-governmental Steering Committee for Capacity Assessment and Rationalisation of the Public Service.

That’s still a substantial 22,476 people, but not if you account for the 61 per cent  who are in the 40-59 age group.

Of old dogs and new tricks. To put it differently, is it humanly possible to effect real change in the government as currently constituted? Pessimists — and there are many — insist that you would need many

major miracles to achieve any meaningful culture change. Fully aware of the challenges ahead, some idealistic youth have gone in to turn it around. They need your support.

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Hey Kanu, suck it up and stop whining!

The grand old party of Kenya, Kanu, is in unfamiliar territory these days. It was remarkable to see Secretary-General Nick Salat claim that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission rigged the

Kericho senate by-election.

“In essence, what those who manipulated the results did amounted to a controlled experiment such that, for every genuine vote that the Kanu candidate received, the manipulation system awarded the JAP

candidate one-and-half votes,” he claimed.

The IEBC called it fiction, of course, and invited the party for a meeting. Kanu used to run this country, in case you have forgotten. It had total control over the Electoral Commission of Kenya.

The party presided over many elections that were a total sham. Now it has been reduced to accusing the government of the day of manipulation. What rich irony!

“It is not the first time the party is making those unsubstantiated claims against the Commission,” noted the electoral body. “Like the over 37 by-elections conducted post-March 2013, the Kericho by-elections

were properly conducted and met the threshold of free and fair elections.”

It looks like Gideon Moi and his party have forgotten their history.

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Netflix is not ready for the world

Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey) and Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) have one of the strangest marriages.

In season 4 of the hit Netflix series, House of Cards, the president is fighting to get elected properly. But if you live in Kenya, or most of the world, you can’t watch that just yet because only two seasons are

available on the local Netflix. Even though you make the same monthly subscription as Americans, some reports say international users are only getting 10 per cent of content available in the US.

The streaming service is now available in 190 countries, but it doesn’t seem to have realised that. Granted, there are complicated licensing agreements for some of that content, but House of Cards is a Netflix original. Why is the rest of the world paying similar fees as the US for only a tenth of what is available on the service? People will just return to illegal downloads.

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FEEDBACK: on why an A is not everything in life

I did an engineering course in college because that was my passion. In my first year of study, we were 36 students. Four years down the line we were only 12; two died, while the rest changed courses or had been discontinued because of poor grades. 

My years in college and my work experience have taught me one thing: grades don’t matter in one’s success. Most engineering courses subject one to being a slave to companies and firms that pay peanuts.

I would never advise anyone to take an engineering course in the hope of earning more. So simply let everyone follow their passion and dreams.

Who knew dancing, deeejaying and comedy would ever pay? Yet now most of the guys who never saw college gates are earning big in entertainment. It’s all about passion.

Tony Kirimi

Larry, I am a big fan of yours, but  from your article, it is clear you didn’t work hard for that B minus.

In your own cleverly crafted wording, all you did was waste electricity reading novels while the rest studied and passed (for people to later claim they rigged their success) and you go further to say you

joined your profession because of your talent. Now, I don’t dispute that you are good at what you do, and I don’t dispute that exam cheating was rampant, but you shouldn’t use this as a platform to justify

your “failures”. And don’t make humanity-related courses look as if they lead to less prestigious professions.

Laban Achoki 

I got a B plain in 2013. I am now in a public university taking a communications course. I do not mean to blow my own trumpet, but KCSE grades are meaningless because I am doing better than all the

students who got the top grades. Some of them cannot even write proper internship application letters. I once read a letter that began, “Deer madam and sir”. I gasped and was a little sad, but my heart was

bursting with joy because this was some sort of vindication for me.

The boy who read John Grisham novels during chemistry and physics lessons, the one who could not correctly do a simple calculus sum, the one who had failed KCSE, according to family and relatives, was

now toppings his class and  being consulted by students from big schools.

Look at me; I made it.