Taasisi nyeti nchini Rwanda sasa zaongozwa na Wataalamu kutokea Ulaya, Marekani na Israel

Mazindu Msambule said:
Ngojea nikwambie kitu (sina hakika na umri wako ); enzi za Mkapa, tuliwahi kufanya kitu cha namna hi, tuliiweka Tanesco chini ya kampuni moja ya Africa kusini inaitwa Net group solution, managing director, director of finance and other senior officials wa Tanesco walikua Wazungu; je hakukua na kukatika kwa umeme? Tuweni wa kweli, tukiondoa siasa na kuweka mbinyo kwa watendaji wa mashirika yote ya umma, mambo yanaweza kwenda. Kwa umri wangu hu, tokea mwaka 1992 tuliaminishwa kwamba endapo mvua zitakua chache mwaka hu then mgao wa umeme ni la kawaida, Mwendazake kaingia madarakani (hapa tuwe tu wakweli, either unampenda mhe Magufuli au unamchukia ) umeme ulikua wa uhakika, before 2015 nilikua na generetor pamoja na mfumo mzima wa Televison kua wa solor; generator sielewi hata lilipotea vipi cause vitu hivyo vimekua sio muhimu cause mwendazake kwenye hili la umeme alifanya kazi na kazi imeonekana, kwenye maduka ya kuuzia simu, ilikua na power bank zipo before 2015 but tembelea maduka mengi sasa hivi, is either hakuna kabisa hizo power bank au zipo chache sana, why? Umeme umekua wa uhakika, hata ukikatika hauchukui muda mrefu umerudi. Hakuna zmungu pale Tanesco but enzi akiwepo mzungu mgao ulikuwepo na kukatika katika kulikuwepo pia.
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Unamuongelea mkapa aliyekua mpigaji na wale makaburu wa NBC au unamuongelea yupi huyo?
 
Afu mtakuja tena kulalamika serikali zenu haziwaamini zinaajiri wageni. Miafrika hatujui tunataka nini.
 
Ngoja nicomment kwanza ndio nirudi kusoma maelezo.

Dikteta PK hajiamini tena amevurugana na marafiki wengi ko ana hofu ya kuchezea chuma
 
Mtuflani Official said:
Nakumbuka NBC bank ilikua vizuri sana kipindi kuna wazungu ila sasa ATM hazina hata pesa. NMB imafuata, ni muda tu......
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Chapter Twelve—​

African Managerial Success:​

Conclusions about Individuals​

Source: African Successes

Many have expressed concern lately about the quality of public management in Africa.[1] The performance of Kenya's public organizations is generally held to be above average for the continent of Africa. But "above average" is still not satisfactory. Focusing on public corporations (parastatals), where performance can be quantified more easily, the Kenya government's Working Party on Government Expenditures found that "examples of unsound and poorly controlled investments can readily be found. . . . [The sector is frequently characterized by a] lack of advance planning, adequate safeguards for Government investment and good management, which has resulted in uncontrolled cost escalations, inefficient technologies and unprofitable enterprises."[2] Similarly, Barbara Grosh reports that half of the corporations she studied had serious problems.[3]

To see what the administrative histories in this study can teach us about the aspects of management that are most critical in the African context, I will begin with a summary evaluation of the managerial performance of the four administrators. I will then argue that in contemporary African conditions the effectiveness of individual managers is particularly important to organizational achievement. We will examine the attributes of the four administrators that seem to have been responsible for their positive impacts, and conclude by asking how this kind of good management can be promoted.

The Varieties of Management​

In reality public management is not one thing but many, so it would be well to acknowledge the plurality of the phenomena and the tensions

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that sometimes exist between them. For example, an attempt by the United States Agency for International Development to address management issues begins by speaking of "how to use scarce resources efficiently to produce development results."[4] Then its focus shifts to project management and factors ranging from project impact and sustainability, on the one hand, to accountability for funds and cost overruns, on the other. Four different types of management behavior are involved in these shifting foci: public policy-making, organizational leadership, internal administration, and what we will call bureaucratic hygiene. These activities are not at all the same; what's more, excellence in one of them can frequently be purchased at the expense of one of the others.

Public policies , of course, are the most important way in which a state affects development. For exampe, development specialists are in substantial agreement that the more efficient methods of promoting agricultural production in Africa today include righting distorted prices, devaluing inflated currencies, and generally decreasing the extent to which the state is extracting resources from the farming sector of the economy. The emphasis often is not so much on improving the operations of the state as on keeping its overall policies congenial to agriculture and on finding ways to decrease the negative role it has often played in the past.[5] These are important issues of public management because they are among the most critical variables affecting program success and sustainability. Kenya's success in agricultural development owes much to the fact that it has not permitted its currency to become seriously overvalued and to the generally favorable prices it pays its farmers. We have noted ways in which Ishmael Muriithi, Charles Karanja, Harris Mule, Simeon Nyachae, and Philip Ndegwa promoted these policies for the commodities with which they were most concerned. In many African countries the best program may well be one that does somewhat less to manage its environment directly and leaves more to the play of market forces. The evidence that we have about the commercialization of Kenyan veterinary services certainly supports such a conclusion.[6]

Organizational leadership is the second variety of management. It entails goal setting and the mobilization of the human and material resources that are necessary to achieve them. The largest part of a leader's efforts is probably directed at factors that are external to his (or her) organization: funds and authorizations are secured; the cooperation of other agencies is negotiated; the support of clients is obtained; and political threats to a program's image and mission are averted. Even many of the internal aspects of a leader's task are political in character—obtaining consensus on goals, inspiring commitment, negotiating interunit conflicts, and so forth. This part of management is an art, not a science,

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and it is second only to public policy in determining whether a project or a program will be successful. The most important managerial contributions of Karanja, Mule, Muriithi, and Nyachae fall under the rubric of leadership.

Internal administration is what we usually think of as management. It entails the organization of work and already secured resources to achieve agreed-upon goals. Important though it is, it is clearly subordinate in importance to a congenial policy framework, an appropriate set of goals, and the acquisition of resources to administer. Charles Karanja was gifted at internal administration; Harris Mule and Ishmael Muriithi were sometimes criticized for not being as skilled in this domain. Excellence in one aspect of management does not necessarily connote its presence in another.

Bureaucratic hygiene : Particularly in the public sector, internal administration also requires the operation of certain control systems that have been designed to assure those outside the organization that its resources are not being misused (e.g., accounts, audits, civil service regulations, contracting mechanisms, and administrative law). These functions, which might be said to maintain "bureaucratic hygiene," are not directly productive themselves. Although organizations that function very badly in these systems often have difficulty securing and managing the resources they need, those that are too scrupulous about them also often fail to meet their objectives. We then appropriately speak of goal displacement and bureaucratic red tape.[7] A recent USAID study found that during the flush period of donor involvement, poor financial management (if unaccompanied by serious corruption) did not hurt the achievement of project goals.[8] Karanja had little to worry about in this area, as the KTDA kept fairly high standards of bureaucratic hygiene. But the regular government ministries often had difficulties with some of these functions, particularly accounting. There was little that Muriithi could do about them, as British practice, which Kenya inherited, divides technical duties from the administration of these bureaucratic control systems. Simeon Nyachae's responsibilities also rarely touched on these matters. Mule tried to get improvement in those parts of his ministry that were suffering from poor bureaucratic hygiene, but this was not his highest priority, and he had only mixed success.

When we consider the factors that affect the success of programs and projects, the hierarchy of importance begins with public policy, is followed by leadership and general internal administration, and ends with bureaucratic hygiene. External criticisms of management, however, often imply a reversal of this rank order. This is partly because failures at the policy and leadership levels are more diffuse and harder to gauge. But it is also due to the special role that the bureaucratic hygiene systems

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are designed to play. These bureaucratic controls were established in the late nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, over considerable resistance, in order to eliminate the abusive use of public goods for private ends. They have been quite successful in that regard in the Western democracies, and their general objectives (although not the detailed consequences of their operation) enjoy considerable public support there. The misuse of public office is certainly a serious problem in much of Africa, but the control systems needed to prevent it receive only sporadic popular backing. Shortcomings in accounting, procurement, and recruitment are often used as pretexts for dismissal but generally against someone whom one opposes for other reasons.

Another external group that often focuses its criticism on bureaucratic hygiene is made up of the international donor agencies. When donor officers move money that will not subsequently withstand an audit or that violates certain procurement regulations, they know they are taking a risk, and they will put pressure on aid recipients to run their control systems in a way that will avoid the danger. Once things begin to go wrong, a vicious cycle sets in: unsuccessful projects invite tighter control and are more vulnerable to audit criticisms; if the host country's control systems are weak, donors will impose their own; both the multiplicity of systems and the pressures to meet these external standards demand more and more host-country managerial attention, pulling it away from policy and leadership and making project failure more likely. Although there have been increasing problems with Kenya's accounting and procurement systems, they have functioned well enough in the areas of donor concern to avoid the worst aspects of this vicious cycle.

The point here is not that bureaucratic hygiene can be neglected, for without it serious corruption can overtake a system. Officials and citizens then become distrustful of one another's greed and engage only reluctantly in constructive cooperative activity. Government's production of economically and socially useful goods then declines. Management has multiple components, however, and the drive for bureaucratic hygiene must be kept in perspective. What ultimately matters most is that the state sets socially useful objectives for itself and achieves them.

Can Managers Affect the Performance of Their Organizations?​

Do these variations in the performance of the four individual administrators actually matter? For example, Barbara Grosh sees the managers of Kenyan public corporations much more as victims than as villains.[9] She was able to develop a twenty-year time series of performance indicators for thirty-three parastatals. Based on the analysis of these data,

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she focuses her attention on the occurrence of adverse economic conditions and on problems with the policies governing many of the enterprises. The very difficult international economic climate in which Kenya has found itself since 1979 is certainly responsible for many of the problems of public corporations.

On the policy front Grosh is impressed with the damage that can be done to parastatals by inflexible controls over the prices at which they buy and sell their products. Some corporations suffered from having to compete against unregulated private firms while their own prices were fixed by the government. Others worked with regulated prices that were appropriate on average but which responded too slowly to the swings in supply and demand and which therefore left them with debilitating surpluses and shortages.

Grosh also stresses problems with the financial structure with which many of these firms worked. Several of the enterprises were seriously undercapitalized, or were deprived of adequate working funds, or both. Others had highly leveraged financial structures, with most of their capital coming from loans rather than equity. These parastatals were highly vulnerable to sudden surges in interest rates. Grosh's analysis draws attention to a number of other, less frequent policy problems as well. Many of these derive from the all too common propensity to give parastatals inherently unprofitable social mandates without providing them with the resources or means that would compensate for the costs involved.[10]

There is little doubt that the policy problems that Grosh cites are real and that they account for much of the poor performance of Kenyan public corporations. In a comparative study of parastatals in Botswana and Tanzania, Rwekaza Mukandala concludes that performance is largely determined by the political context and government agenda within which these corporations operate.[11] By extension, the same argument that performance problems are based in the framework of public policy applies to the regular government ministries as well. Are we then to conclude that management accounts for little in the variation in effectiveness of these organizations?

The Policy Responsibilities of Management​

The analyses by Grosh and Mukandala imply that policy-making and management are separable functions; they are not. Philip Selznick's classic Leadership in Administration stressed that the most important role of chief executives is not internal administration but setting the objectives for their organizations and mobilizing the resources to achieve them.[12] This view was presaged in the work of Chester Barnard,[13] and it has

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been strongly reinforced by organizational studies since.[*] It is reflected in the way we defined management in the preceding section.

The four administrators were not the passive recipients of public policies, but exhibited the kind of leadership and skill at manipulating the environment of their organizations which the organizational literature describes.[14] The examples of these men confirm that the best managers are active in shaping the policy framework within which they operate. Charles Karanja was able to secure authority for the KTDA to take over the international marketing and processing (or manufacturing) of its tea from the multinationals. He also successfully evaded the burdensome increase in payroll costs for KTDA factories that was threatened by the Tri-Partite Agreements between government, labor, and business. Ish-

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mael Muriithi secured the intervention of President Kenyatta to stop the evasion of livestock quarantines by powerful government officials. Simeon Nyachae and Harris Mule were able to persuade President Moi to negotiate a structural adjustment loan with the International Monetary Fund in the difficult circumstances of September 1982. Nyachae played a similar role with Philip Ndegwa of the Central Bank in early 1983 over devaluation. The best and most effective administrators have taken the initiative and helped to shape the policy environment within which they operate.

Of course they have not always been successful. The KTDA lost control of the domestic marketing of packaged tea during the Moi administration because Karanja mishandled a public controversy over the smuggling of tea to Ethiopia. Mule and Nyachae had to back away from a liberalization of grain marketing, which they favored but which had become too hot politically. Some issues cannot be won even by skillful and well-connected managers, who then have to know how to detour around them. Even though the executives of public organizations can win only a portion of the policy battles in which they engage, that portion is critical nonetheless to the health of their organizations.

The successful managers, then, will focus on the issues that are central to their firms' performance and will assemble the resources necessary to address them. To the extent that those issues are matters of public policy, they will seek to find policy alternatives that are viable within their political context, to present them cogently to those with the power to influence their acceptance, and to mobilize support for them.

Management does make a difference. It is necessary for setting direction and securing external resources and policies. It also is needed to focus the organization's internal energies and to motivate and empower the efforts of subordinates. Organizational leadership thus has both external and internal faces. Charles Karanja's performance in the KTDA is a particularly striking illustration.

Of course, Karanja, and by extension management, was not solely responsible for the success of the KTDA; the Authority inherited a sound institutional structure and operated in generally favorable economic and political environments. Nonetheless, those advantages had to be translated into concrete organizational initiatives, and the Authority's high standards of performance had to be maintained, defended, and extended. It is easy to imagine that the KTDA would have been much less successful if it had had more passive and less skilled management. The political, economic, and institutional context explains much of the KTDA's accomplishments, but several of the positive features of that environment were shaped by the management itself.

Similar points can be made about the Veterinary Service and Ishmael

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Muriithi in the 1970s and about Mule's and Nyachae's initiatives over decentralization and agricultural pricing in the 1980s. Political leaders, institutions, and administrators have an interaction effect on performance. Managers cannot act alone, but the best ones are not passive victims of their context, for they frequently can influence the policy context in which they operate. Even more clearly, good managers are needed to take effective advantage of a congenial context when it does arise.

Can Individual Managers Make a Difference?​

The stress on the importance of leadership made by the organizational literature and the preceding discussion of Karanja does not necessarily lead one to a "great man" theory of organizational accomplishment. Herbert Kaufman concluded that the U.S. federal executives he studied made only modest incremental impacts on the policies and programs of their agencies.[15] Certainly most administrators are able only occasionally to shift significantly the public policies governing their organizations. Their leadership skills are more commonly employed in coping with their policy environment, not changing it.

A vigorous dissent to the view that individual management makes a difference is advanced by James March. He casts the issue of managerial impact in a new and insightful light. In a pair of articles on the careers of Wisconsin school superintendents, he suggests that the pattern of apparent failures (dismissals) and successes (promotions to better districts) is really random. "Most of the time superintendents are organizationally nearly indistinguishable in their behaviors, performances, abilities, and values."[16]

Reflecting on these results several years later, March was careful to interpret them in a way that nonetheless acknowledged the importance of administration. As a result of the many promotional filters through which management candidates pass on their way to the top, he said, the variation in chief executives is smaller than the measurement errors involved in evaluating their performance. Because the criteria for successful management must be vague to reward adaptability and because events beyond organizational control are important, the identification of an outstanding manager is imprecise.

Toward the top of an organization, it is difficult to know unambiguously that a particular manager makes a difference. Notice that this is not the same as suggesting that management is unimportant. Management may be extremely important even though managers are indistinguishable. It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark.
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[In my] view, managers do affect the ways in which organizations func-
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tion. But as a result of the process by which managers are selected, motivated, and trained, variations in managers do not reliably produce variations in organizational outcomes. In such a conception, administrators are vital as a class but not as individuals. Administration is important, and the many things that administrators do are essential to keeping the organization functioning; but if those vital things are only done when there is an unusually gifted individual at the top, the organization will not thrive. What makes an organization function well is the density of administrative competence, the kind of selection procedures that make all vice-presidents look alike from the point of view of their probable success.[17]
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March's is the dissident view. Most others take the role of the top executive more seriously. His generalization that individual managers are unimportant is most likely to hold true for mature organizations that have achieved stable personnel systems at a high level of performance. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, who think managerial leadership is exceedingly important in the early stages of a firm's development, agree with March that "the excellent companies seem to have developed cultures that have incorporated the values and practices of the great leaders and thus these shared values can be seen to survive for decades after the passing of the original guru."[18] Note, however, that this stable personnel system in which individual managerial candidates are themselves interchangeable is itself initially a managerial creation.

The pool of African qualified managers is newer in Kenya and therefore likely to be thinner. Moreover, many of the country's public organizations are young and have not achieved organizational stability. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect much greater variation in managerial performance there, even by March's criteria. March's analysis is helpful, however, for it directs our attention away from the individual, exceptional, chief executive officer and leads us to focus on the attributes that one would like almost all of the managerial cadre to share. It also causes us to look at the personnel system through which managerial candidates are generated and selected and to ask if managers with these attributes are likely to come out of it.

The Attributes of Successful Kenyan Management​

If management does matter, then what makes a good manager? This study has been conducted in search of the keys to African managerial success, and the task has not been easy. The four Kenyans whose biographies have been pursued have managed rural development initiatives, that domain of public activity in which failure is most prevalent.[19] All of these men were responsible for important successes, but they had fail-

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ures as well.[*] For example, Mule was less effective at internal administration than he was at policy-making and leadership. Similarly, Muriithi's leadership faltered seriously after the death of Kenyatta. And Nyachae can be criticized for centralizing too much authority in his own hands. Each of these men had his weaknesses. The assessment of their managerial attributes that follows therefore is a subtle one, giving greater weight to those factors that are associated with the successes and steering away from those elements that seem to be responsible for their failures. I have been aided in this assessment by the wide range of interviews that I conducted with the associates of these men, of whom at least one hundred expressed opinions about the managerial attributes of one of the four administrators.

Political Connections and Organizational Autonomy​

One of the older pieces of wisdom on public enterprises is that their effective management requires political autonomy. Organizations are expected to prosper to the extent that their leaders are appointed for their technical and not political qualifications.[20] It is evident from this study that this analysis is too simple.

Although all four of our administrators were professionally well qualified for the positions they held, their managerial success and the autonomy of their organizations was critically dependent on their political connections.[**] The quantitative evidence presented in Appendix B supports this point. So do the multiple instances we have encountered in which these managers were able to influence their political environment to suit the policy needs of their organizations. A few examples are Karanja on tea processing and marketing, Muriithi on milk and artificial insemination prices, Mule and Nyachae on agricultural prices, and Ndegwa and Nyachae on devaluation.

The converse—that loss of political connections can threaten organizational performance—is also illustrated by this study. When Kenyatta died, Karanja lost his direct contacts with the president, but he was so confident of the importance of the KTDA and of the quality of his management that he continued to act with the same independence and decisiveness. Ultimately this cost him his position, through the crisis engendered by the smuggling of tea to Ethiopia. Similarly, when Kenyatta

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died and Geoffrey Kariithi retired as head of the civil service, Ishmael Muriithi was deprived of his connections with the Office of the President and was unable to protect the Veterinary Services from the conflicts and mindless budget cutting that then undermined its effectiveness. In his final years as director he lost his characteristic vigor and decisiveness and came near to a despairing lethargy, probably only partly due to his declining health.

In all of these cases we see public servants pursuing professionally dictated policies and striving to protect the integrity of their organizations against inappropriate political pressures. Their ability to do so was directly contingent on their personal connections, direct or indirect, with the president. When these relationships of confidence were lost, so was their managerial effectiveness. Thus we see that the autonomy of an organization from undue politicization is not something that can simply be granted to it in a single constitutional act. It has to be earned and then maintained through political connections. As is illustrated by the work of Rwekaza Mukandala and Barbara Grosh, virtually all public organizations need favorable policy decisions and additional resources at critical junctures if they are to prosper.[21] They also need protection from unwise policy initiatives and politicization. All of these requisites, even depoliticization, are achieved as a consequence of political action. In Kenya and most other African states the relevant political intervention comes from the president.

In John Montgomery's quantitative study of managerial behavior in the public sector in southern Africa he was struck by the absence of the kind of bureaucratic politics he is accustomed to seeing in the United States. Permanent secretaries and their equivalents almost never try to build support for the policies they favor with legislators, party personnel, interest groups, or any other "structural coalitions of like-minded partners." Instead, they resolve problems through the use of personal relationships.[22] This is a sign, not of the absence of politics, but of the presence of a very different form of politics. Power in African political systems is aggregated out of patronage networks, is highly personalized, and generally is concentrated in the hands of the head of state.

Effective public servants are able to mobilize support at critical junctures, not by building independent political bases of support for themselves or their organizations, but from personal access to, and the confidence of, the president, either directly or through others who are close to him. Politics is more like the court intrigue of an earlier era than like what one is accustomed to seeing in industrialized societies today. By and large, these crucial connections were not accidental for the four men studied here. They resulted from loyalty and careful network building and are a tribute to the men's administrative astuteness in an

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underbureaucratized environment.[23] Thus political considerations are important in the appointment of the most senior public servants if political autonomy and effectiveness are to be maintained.

Professional Concern with Public Policy and Organizational Mission​

Not everyone who has the confidence of a president is going to use it to advance the performance of the organization that he or she leads. This is particularly true for those who come to positions of leadership in Africa through a political career or because of their ability to mobilize support in the larger political community. They are apt to see their positions and the powers these convey as a reward for the delivery of their support to the president, not as a resource to be used to advance the effectiveness of the organization. Managers with this type of political support tend to sap, not strengthen, their units.

The problem goes well beyond politicians. Montgomery's study of southern African managers left him troubled about the ends toward which they were administering their organizations. Development goals did not play a prominent role in their decisions and activities. Money and turf were the most frequent causes of bureaucratic conflict; policy matters came a distinct fifth. When resources were at stake, "there is not much concern over their relation to their public origin or to the public interest. . . . Arguments . . . center about the convenience of the individual users more than about the mission of the organization to which they are assigned."[24]

The four administrators differed dramatically from this characterization. They had very well defined organizational missions they wanted to accomplish, were activist and entrepreneurial in their pursuit, devoted considerable attention to the public policies affecting them, and were concerned that the resources they managed served the public interest. They saw internal administration as grounded in a larger set of purposes and felt some responsibility as well for the factors outside their organization that affected them. Their entrepreneurship and concern with policy came from the leading role Kenyatta accorded to the civil service and from their recognition that they were necessary to the achievement of their goals. But those goals and their public-regarding character came from still deeper and more exceptional roots.

The effective managers in our "sample" were committed professionals. Harris Mule and Ishmael Muriithi were trained overseas as an economist and a veterinarian, respectively. Both men were deeply committed to their professions and dedicated to maintaining their standards in Kenya. Charles Karanja was trained in Uganda as a civil engineer. Such a background was unnecessary to the leadership of the KTDA, but it did seem to shape Karanja's ideas about public service and efficiency. In

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all three of these cases professional identity gave these men a strong commitment to the goals of the organizations they headed and caused them to resist their use for inappropriate personal gain by themselves or others.

Simeon Nyachae was prepared to be a provincial administrator, first by his father, Chief Nyandusi, and then by training in Kenya and England. This background gave him a very strong identification with the state and a principled determination to serve the interests of those who hold political power. In his years as a provincial commissioner these values did not give him a particularly strong commitment to the goals of some of the organizations with which he was involved, and he was willing to see them taxed to serve the personal interests of those who held political power over him. When he came onto the national scene, however, Nyachae increasingly came to see the interests of the "nation," conceived in a conservative sense, as coincident with the interests of his president, the state, and the business class of which he was a part. This broadening of vision gave him a set of values that made him quite open to the policies advocated by the economist Mule.

Professional Integrity​

All four men were careful to place the interests of the organizations that they served above their own pursuit of personal gain. Although their conceptions of what constitutes conflict of interest were generally more lax than those applied in the United States today, they definitely had ethics and adhered to them. They also differed among themselves. Muriithi's and particularly Mule's personal ethics were the strictest, and their personal wealth upon retirement was consequently modest. Karanja and Nyachae had laxer conceptions and left the public service rich. Nonetheless, their wealth was due to hard work and business acumen and probably only to a minor degree to the positions they had held, particularly for Karanja.

The question is, as long as they care well for their organizations, does it matter for their effectiveness whether public managers use their positions to advance their personal wealth in Africa? I have concluded that the answer is yes. Certainly the general political and social environment of which these men were a part was quite unconcerned about corruption and effectively encouraged it. In much the same way as Robert Price demonstrated for Ghana,[25] the question in the popular mind was never how prominent officials got their wealth but whether they were personally transferring resources to their relatives and home areas. My interviews revealed, however, that a different set of values usually prevailed inside public agencies among the professional subordinates and peers of

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the managers I studied. The respect and support that a manager of a professional organization received from his subordinates and from his peers in related organizations appeared to be heavily contingent on his perceived personal integrity. This does not mean that these subordinates and peers were always behaving with integrity themselves. Unlike members of the general public, however, they understood the concept of conflict of interest and felt that they owed effort and support to those who were faithful to it, even if they were not. Conversely, they felt free to be slack in their duties if they were asked to do something by someone whose integrity they doubted. I'm not suggesting that Kenyan professionals always or even usually practice what they preach, but they do believe what they preach. Their values on integrity have something of the same status as American values on marital fidelity in presidential politics: even those who do not practice the ethical code themselves believe that those who break it do not deserve to hold leadership positions. Thus in Kenya those whose integrity is in doubt are unlikely to be effective managers of professional organizations. Indeed, the decline in the careers of Karanja and Muriithi can be traced in part to revelations that they had profited from minor conflicts of interest.

I have carefully limited the above generalization about the relationship between integrity and managerial effectiveness to professional organizations. Interviews with Simeon Nyachae's colleagues in the Provincial Administration did not reveal much concern with the issue of conflict of interest. It is possible that this part of the Kenya government is so closely tied to the regulation and practice of politics that it has no distinct professional code of ethics on such matters.

Access to Donor Resources​

Another attribute that proved critical to managerial effectiveness was the ability to inspire the confidence of international actors. African economies are relatively small and weak, and international markets together with gifts and loans from international donors are unusually important to them. Those managers who are skilled at acquiring these resources are able to use them to gain flexibility in an environment that is usually severely constrained. They also perform for the economy a function that gives them support from other powerful domestic politicians and public servants.

Harris Mule was particularly well known for his skill with donors; this attribute was independently raised by eight quite different interviewees. It is interesting that whereas the foreigners tended to say that Mule "gets along well with donors," one of the Kenyan respondents said that "he handles donors well," a subtle but significant difference in perspective.

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Mule was useful in international economic negotiations because he both understood donor objectives and was able to make them understand Kenyan political constraints in turn. Thus he was invaluable in advancing some of the reforms that donors regarded as important and in getting them to accept the fact that others were unachievable at the time. In this way he was crucial to obtaining IMF, World Bank, and bilateral donor resources at critical junctures for the economy. Mule's skill in this regard was immensely aided by, and may well have depended on, his reputation for professionalism and absolute personal integrity, which made donors trust what he said. One donor even funded a small project in Mule's home area to reward him for being so incorruptible that he was unable to finance any significant projects himself.

Ishmael Muriithi's professional reputation was similarly responsible for inspiring international confidence in his Veterinary Services and thus giving Kenya access to the lucrative European beef market, despite the continued presence of foot-and-mouth disease in the country. In a similar way, the high regard with which he was held in international veterinary circles helped him to bring the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Disease and other, even more direct, forms of donor assistance to Kenya.

Charles Karanja's reputation for efficient management of the Kenya Tea Development Authority facilitated its continued access to substantial amounts of assistance, particularly from the World Bank, and thus gave it the resources and flexibility to grow beyond what Kenya's domestic capital constraints would have allowed.[26] The KTDA's size and international reputation in turn gave Karanja weight in many domestic policy struggles.

The only one of the four who was not particularly gifted with the international community was Simeon Nyachae. As a provincial commissioner, Nyachae had been one of President Kenyatta's primary instruments for the control of domestic politics.[27] When Nyachae came to the national policy scene he had very little international experience and was tainted by his past political connections. He and the donors did not understand each other very well, and the donors were not certain that they could trust him. It was here that Nyachae's alliance with Mule was of such great importance; just as Nyachae provided Mule with political connections, Mule provided donor access to Nyachae.

Africanization​

Frequently there was a downside to donor confidence, one that reduced the loyalty that managers inspired in their own staff. Three of the managers in our "sample" felt that they had to use some non-Kenyan staff

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in order to maintain high professional standards in their organizations, standards that gave them a strong international reputation. The morale and allegiance of their Kenyan staff depended, however, on a vigorous Africanization program, replacing foreign with local staff.

Charles Karanja handled this dilemma best. He concentrated expatriate staff in training positions and in those parts of the organization where new functions were being added. By externalizing the conflict he was able to rally nationalist sentiment for his personnel policies despite the continued use of foreigners. He argued that the important issue was not the exact distribution of positions inside the organization but whether it would be the Kenyan-controlled KTDA or the multinational corporations that would control critical aspects of the domestic tea industry. For the technically demanding role of factory manager, he was able to point out that the multinationals did not believe it was possible for any Kenyan African to do the job in the near future. Thus when he hired an expatriate to head the factory division and to train managers, he could argue that he was promoting, not hindering, Africanization. In the process he was able to unleash a nationalist determination among his recruits to do their jobs well and prove the multinationals wrong.

Ishmael Muriithi was not so adept. He was under great pressure to replace expatriate veterinarians with Kenyans as they became available. He argued that this was not an issue. As the country had a shortage of veterinarians anyway, both should be employed. But he also felt that his highest priority was to assign African veterinarians to field positions, where they would be able to interact with African producers of livestock. This meant that he was seen as keeping expatriates in the highly prized headquarters positions. Consequently, he developed a reputation among his Kenyan staff for being insufficiently attentive to their advancement and lost some of their loyalty. This was unfortunate, for the circumstances closely parallel those in the KTDA, where Karanja was able to engender the extra incentive of nationalist competition. The measure of an "Africanizer" may be as much subjective as objective. The manager who is able to give reality to an external promotion standard that he is helping his staff to meet will outperform one who is seen as being the gatekeeper himself.

Harris Mule also had trouble with Africanization, a problem he inherited from his predecessor, Philip Ndegwa. In Finance and Planning, the replacement of expatriates with locals in line positions took place relatively rapidly, perhaps too rapidly. For it was then felt that certain critical skills were still in short supply, and foreign advisers were brought in to provide them. Mule's Kenyan subordinates frequently resented the

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influence that some of these advisers had, as well as the fact that the foreigners often seemed to get the more challenging work. There was something of a vicious circle here, for as Kenyans grew discontented with foreign advisers they sometimes became more lax in their own work, and the need for expatriates increased. Something like Karanja's device for making this competition functional rather than destructive was needed.

Being a "Nationalist"​

The nationalism inherent in the pressures to Africanize was not directed only against foreigners; it was also a force against undue parochialism. Interviews with the colleagues of the four frequently provoked strongly felt comments that one or another was or was not "a nationalist." It quickly became clear that this term was not meant to describe that person's attitudes about matters external to Kenya but instead indicated whether he was favoring his own group in the allocation of resources, particularly those related to employment.

All public institutions in Kenya employ a mixture of ethnic groups throughout their hierarchy. If the organization is to perform effectively, these ethnically diverse staff must be able to work well together. Not only will a manager typically have to rely on the efforts of crucial subordinates who do not belong to his group, but a staff member also usually finds that the hierarchy that controls his or her promotion has someone from another group in it somewhere.

This need for interethnic cooperation and trust creates tension, for even senior, highly educated officers naturally will draw their friends disproportionately from among those who share their mother tongue.[28] Kenyan staff believe that their career prospects are improved if their supervisor belongs to their ethnic group. This perception may be true for junior staff appointments and promotions, but the data analyzed in Appendix A do not bear it out for senior officers. Nonetheless, even if the belief is false, it has real consequences. Staff expect ethnically based favoritism among their superiors, seek out fellow tribesmen who may be able to help them accordingly, and are ever alert to signs of parochial ties being used against them.

Simeon Nyachae did exercise some of the powers of patronage that were expected of him by his community and his political superiors. But he was careful to exercise them only over symbolic positions where poor performance would not greatly affect the organizations involved. His own immediate staff comprised a wide range of ethnic groups. These officers had confidence that parochial considerations did not influence his promotion of their careers. As a consequence, they had great loyalty

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to him and performed well. A similar impartial concern for ability to do the job well seemed to guide the influence he exerted on operational senior executive positions throughout the Kenya government.

Harris Mule was even more clearly above ethnic ties in his personnel decisions and commanded strong loyalty from his officers as a result. In both Nyachae's and Mule's ministries senior officers who belonged to ethnic groups that were at one another's throats in the larger political arena cooperated well under their leadership.

Charles Karanja did not do quite so well in convincing his staff that he was "a nationalist," and this contributed to his downfall. We have seen that his high standards for performance were applied without favor and that he was careful to maintain some ethnic balance in key positions. Nonetheless, the perception persisted among some staff that Kikuyus, especially those from Kiambu, were being given an edge. This belief may well have been largely unjustified, but Karanja's admitted willingness to give those personally connected with him a first chance to prove their worth lent credence to the perception. The beneficiaries of Karanja's patronage, if we are to call it that, did excellent work. He never compromised on that. But those who felt outside his circle of favor sometimes withheld their enthusiasm from their work as a result. If these employees could not be fired for political reasons, the KTDA suffered—and so ultimately did Karanja. It is likely that one of these disgruntled employees leaked to the press the information that irreparably damaged Karanja's career.

The pattern of values with regard to ethnic favoritism is similar to the one we found for corruption. Society expects that senior administrators will provide assistance to those from their home areas and applies a good deal of pressure toward that end. Civil servants also expect such behavior from their colleagues, but they, unlike the general society, are ambivalent about it. Many will use junior staff appointments they control to satisfy the pressures of petitioners from their villages, and some will try to find ethnic allies to help them promote their own careers, although usually without too much success. But these same civil servants do not want to see signs of parochialism among their own superiors. They expect it, but admire its absence. A superior who is "a nationalist" commands their respect and commitment. The organization then performs well. Superiors who are parochial are given only the cooperation they can coerce and are often undermined by those outside their group.

Staff Management​

Africanization and nationalism are really Kenya-specific attributes of the more universal issue of staff management. All four of the adminis-

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trators showed good judgment in selecting and promoting the staff who worked with them. Mule even had the sense to put strong "naysayers" in charge of budgetary matters in his ministry, knowing that he himself was weak in that area.

The four also set high standards for their staff once they were in place. Karanja and Nyachae were particularly firm in this regard. Both men would quickly rid themselves of staff whose work disappointed them. As Karanja was in a parastatal corporation, he could and did fire them. Nyachae, in dealing with tenured civil servants, was more constrained and instead transferred them to harmless "punishment" posts. But Nyachae had a temper, and this made him somewhat unpredictable. As a consequence, some of those working with him were overly cautious. Mule and Muriithi were less ruthless, and their organizations lacked the discipline of Karanja's and Nyachae's as a result. But their standards and expectations were clear, measured, and fair, which also helped to produce good work.

The other side of the high-standards coin was the protection and support given to those officers who were doing well. Karanja and Nyachae worked hard to advance the careers of the officers whose work pleased them. Muriithi was much less aggressive in this area, and this clearly cost him support among his senior staff. Nyachae also was unusual in his willingness to defend civil servants publicly when he thought they were being attacked unfairly by politicians. Mule supported his officers by refusing to listen to rumors about them. He would only receive complaints against a staff member if it was delivered in the subordinate's presence. All four men were easily accessible to those working with them and sympathetic to their problems. In this variety of ways Karanja, Nyachae, and Mule generated particularly strong support among their officers and could count on their loyalty and effort in return.

For these men staff management became staff development.[29] The kinds of personal rewards they provided and loyalties they developed are important to organizations everywhere. But they may be especially important in Africa where the institutional standards and incentives are often weak.

Competition and Management Information Systems​

One attribute of successful management that we found was at first surprising. A strong management information system (MIS) seemed to be at the root of much of the effectiveness of Charles Karanja and Dan Mbogo, Ishmael Muriithi's younger brother. Such systems have a checkered record.[30] The typical MIS in Africa is a highly technical device that is developed in isolation from the top managers who need to use it. Once information is alienated from authority, it loses its effect. But Kar-

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anja and Mbogo each understood his MIS well and knew how to use it to make decisions.

Another attribute of these two management information systems was that they produced comparative information. In the typical MIS a wealth of technical detail is created, but it is hard to interpret. The systems used by Karanja and Mbogo monitored the performance of comparable local field operations. The information produced by this type of MIS can be used to influence the careers of field officers; and it was so used in the KTDA. The field staff thus often paid attention to their comparative standing themselves, not waiting for the feedback of their superiors.

Thus the really important management innovation in the KTDA was the institutionalization of competition among field units. The MIS was important, not so much for its own sake, but as the device that produced information about the competitive standings.[31]

Delegation​

One attribute of good management, the skill of delegating, did not come easily to most of the four. An organization is limited to the time, energy, and attention span of its chief executive if there is no delegation. Dating back into the colonial era, senior civil servants in Africa have had trouble delegating. Jon Moris has described this as the hub-and-wheel pattern of administration. The senior officer places himself at the hub of all decisions and delegates the execution of straightforward tasks only. Little real discretion is permitted to subordinates. This style of administration arises most frequently in settings in which there is a great gap between the skills of the person in charge and his or her subordinates and is widespread in Africa.[32]

Karanja's instinct was to do all the important work himself. He even insisted on editing the KTDA's annual report. He learned to delegate only when his heart objected and his overwork threatened to take his life.

Mule delegated to those staff who inspired his confidence (including foreign advisers), but there were not enough of these for the work that had to be done. He never did discover how to delegate progressively more responsible tasks to his junior subordinates so as to help them learn new skills and eventually give him confidence in their ability to undertake major decisions.

Nyachae generally was willing to delegate, but he fell victim to officers who were afraid to exercise the authority they had. At the time he became chief secretary many heads of government departments no longer had the confidence of the president. They sometimes had difficulty in making their decisions stick, and they rightly felt that the president was waiting for them to make mistakes that could be a pretext for their re-

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moval. Nyachae clearly did have President Moi's confidence. And so they turned to him for advice and support. Once asked to make a decision, Nyachae would do so and take full political responsibility for it. He also had an instinct to exercise control over units in which he lacked confidence, rather than finding good new executives to exercise discretion within them. Thus, despite Nyachae's calls for department and ministry heads to exercise the powers officially delegated to their offices, more and more authority was centralized in his office. He made a prodigious number of decisions, but those matters he did not get to were neglected.

Unless delegation is institutionalized, organizational attention is limited by the capabilities of the individual who heads it. The custom in Kenya is not to delegate. Karanja overcame this disability only when his health demanded it. Mule's and Nyachae's impacts were limited (in different ways) because they were not able to delegate effectively.

Risk Taking​

A further attribute that emerges from our case studies is the willingness to take risks, an attribute that seems to be rare among African managers.[33] All four men occasionally faced circumstances in which they had to put their own careers at stake by making decisions or advocating policies that were critical to their organizations. Karanja, Mule, and Nyachae were willing to do so when they calculated that the political odds gave them some chance of success, and they usually won. Muriithi was a more classically "conservative" bureaucrat, and his organization may have suffered at some critical junctures as a result.

Why were these three managers willing to risk their careers? Karanja and Nyachae both said that it was because they were already well-to-do and had always intended to make their careers in private business rather than the public sector anyway. Mule had always been dedicated to a public career, and his personal property was modest, but he too felt that his welfare did not depend on his continued government service. His family was small and his living standards were within the means of his pension. Also, since he had been incorruptible, he could make more as a private or international executive. Although I think that all three men, in different ways, loved the exercise of power, that love did not outweigh their drive to accomplish certain goals that they had set for their organizations, and they felt that they had the financial independence to take that risk. Business or other executive positions awaited them outside the public sector.

Paradoxically, the fact that the Kenyan state does not have a monopoly control over positions earning higher income seems to have given it better service from its managers by making them less averse to risk. Mu-

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riithi's unwillingness to take the same risks as the other three men may have been due to the extremely limited possibilities for private veterinary practice in Kenya, which his own policies had helped to create.[34]

Drive​

Finally, it is not surprising that all four men had extraordinary drive and an ability for hard work that was sometimes of legendary proportions. This is one of the attributes of successful executives that Warren Bennis and Peter Vaill found in the United States, and we noted earlier that our successful Kenyan shared all those same attributes.[35] The enumeration of managerial attributes has concentrated on those aspects of Kenyan management that seem to supplement or give a special twist to the U.S. features. Nonetheless, the four administrators were different from many other ambitious Kenyans in the way in which they exhibited their drive, and special note should be taken of this. They worked exceedingly long hours and were extremely self-disciplined. Mule read voraciously and into the early hours of every morning. Nyachae was famous for the speed with which he gave written reply to memos. All four were unusual for being extremely temperate in their drinking.

Selection Policy and Organizational Performance​

Problems with the Current Kenyan Analysis​

Management does matter, but how is the state to get good practitioners of the art? The way the Kenyan government has been trying to achieve this recently may be exacerbating rather than solving the problem. The State Corporations Act of 1986, which was recommended by the two Ndegwa reports, is oriented toward establishing controls over parastatals management. It not only strengthens accounting and financial reporting procedures, which indeed are needed for effectively evaluating managerial performance; it also mandates detailed cost controls and central approval of parastatal budgets, measures that reduce managerial flexibility. One-fourth of the Act's sections provide for the personal prosecution of parastatal managers and board members for failure to comply with government directives.[36]

It is well established in organization theory that controls induce formalism and rigidity and are ill-suited to positions that require problem solving and the exercise of discretion. The performance of researchers, professionals, and senior executives is most enhanced by careful attention to the selection of appropriate personnel and the removal of those who fail to perform satisfactorily. Attempts to control the details of their behavior will tie the organization up in bureaucracy. In the words of

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Martin Landau, "To manage is not to control."[37] Thus A. H. Hanson's classic work on public corporations stresses the need for managerial authonomy.[38]

Precisely because of the importance of the contextual factors that Grosh emphasizes, good management comes from the selection of managers who understand their environments and are able to obtain the resources their organizations need, including favorable policy decisions. If they are to operate effectively in Kenya, organizational heads cannot be selected simply for technical excellence. They must have direct or indirect access to the president and be able to inspire him to have confidence in their recommendations.

Kenyatta's Selection Policies​

The personnel policies of Jomo Kenyatta appear to have been consistent with this model of management, at least for the first decade of his presidency. It is evident that Kenyatta appointed many ministers, assistant ministers, parastatal board members and chairmen, and sometimes even chief executive officers of public organizations, solely for political reasons. But somewhere at the top of each organization there usually was at least one individual, often a Kikuyu, who was competent and motivated and in whom the president had great personal confidence. Kenyatta followed this person's advice and was responsive to his pleas for supportive policies, just as he was to Charles Karanja at the KTDA. It would quickly become evident who this individual was, and the informal authority structure of the corporation would be organized around him (or her). In many cases it appears that Kenyatta's ability to find an executive in whom he had confidence was aided by there being at least a few people on the board of the corporation who were experienced in the area and from whom he could get advice. Thus, although most board appointees may have been strictly political and gained from, rather than contributed to, their organizations, a minority had the competence and inspired the confidence necessary to manage effectively. Kenyatta clearly delegated a great deal of authority to these individuals.

These chief executives who combined formal office with the informal authority of the president were often able to build effective teams of junior officers. Because they had the influence to make promotions and because they had the vision to use it in their organization's interest, they were able to stimulate élan and effort among their subordinates. These junior men and women not only contributed to the immediate performance of their organizations, they also formed a cadre out of which future senior executives could be selected. Where this process worked well, as it did in the KTDA, those promoted to senior management from within were very likely to succeed. The job socialization and filtering processes

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worked to create a pool of administrators who were imbued with their organization's values and who were in many ways indistinguishable from one another when promoted. For organizations like the KTDA the depersonalization and continuity of internal administrative excellence of which March and Peters and Waterman speak was achieved.[39]

It appears that this pattern of "planting" an excellent executive deteriorated in Kenyatta's final years as his health failed. His judgment in personnel appointments was no longer so sound, and many of those around him manipulated his decisions for their personal benefit. Thus when Kenyatta died many Kenyans were more impressed with the rapaciousness of the more recent, generally Kikuyu, appointees than they were with the quality and reliability of the more numerous and still-serving earlier group. This impression legitimated a view that saw senior administrative positions as more concerned with the distribution of benefits than with the creation of value.

Moi's Personnel Policies​

Daniel arap Moi found himself in an awkward position when he succeeded to the presidency in 1978. He inherited a large group of Kikuyu senior officials, some good and some not, who had inspired Kenyatta's confidence. Since the Kikuyu were an important part of his governing coalition through 1982, he could not simply remove these executives. But they did not enjoy Moi's confidence, and they therefore were unable to get supportive decisions from him in the same way in which they had with Kenyatta. As the economic environment had taken a sudden turn for the worse and new policies were frequently urgently needed, the organizations managed by these individuals began to fail.

Meanwhile President Moi played a game of attrition. He established a mandatory retirement age of fifty-five, which enabled him to dispense with the services of many of Kenyatta's appointees. He would wait for the rest to make some error or for their organizations to show signs of failure. The offending executives could then be dismissed with legitimacy in the public's eyes. Whatever its political necessity, this strategy was terribly debilitating for the quality of public management. Executives were not only unable to get the policy decisions and resources that they needed, they also experienced great uncertainty and insecurity about their jobs. They became cautious and managed by the rule book instead of taking the initiatives that were needed to solve their organizations' problems.

The preceding are only transitional problems, however. If these "holdover executives" were replaced one by one by others who were skilled and also enjoyed the new president's confidence, all would eventually be well. The administrative system then would be guided by a new

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set of values—the president's agenda. If the new appointees had the attributes outlined in the preceding section, the administration would pursue those objectives with great effectiveness, as it did under Nyachae, Mule, and Philip Ndegwa.

If the new crop of top executives lacked energy and intelligence, were not dedicated to their organizations' professional standards, were unable to command the respect of their subordinates, or were self-serving and corrupt, the performance of the public service would begin to deteriorate. The negative effects would not be immediately evident. For a time the habits of good work by holdovers who had been wisely recruited would carry the organization forward. Eventually, however, their morale would be sapped, and their critical mass of quality would be diluted by new staff who were not as gifted or as dedicated.

The difference between these two scenarios would not be the use of political considerations in making appointments. Kenyatta used them, and it is inevitable and necessary that they come into play when the goals that the state is pursuing are at stake. The difference would be how gifted the appointees were and whether those goals were broadly or narrowly conceived.

In any case, the Kenyan experience strongly suggests that a president's personnel policies are among his most important and have effects over a long term. No president can know enough, or work hard enough, to make good decisions by himself. He needs subordinates upon whose values and competence he can rely for guidance. If he neglects one or the other of these dimensions in his personnel decisions, he will still have a few good managers by chance alone. But the density of quality will be reduced and will deteriorate over time.

Internationalizing Professionalism​

The lessons for outsiders wishing to enhance African managerial performance are somewhat different. From their point of view the ability of a manager to inspire presidential confidence is an exogenous variable, over which they can have little influence. All they can do is assure that the other attributes of managerial effectiveness are widely distributed, increasing the probability that someone who has them will also be close to the president. Of these other attributes three are of greatest importance and are in fact related to one another. Concern with organizational mission, professional integrity, and risk taking are all influenced by professionalization. A manager who is deeply imbued with the values of his or her profession is focused on the goals toward which organizational resources are to be directed and will keep his or her own interests from interfering with their pursuit. Furthermore, someone with internationally recognized professional qualifications, standing,

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and reputation has a wide range of options as to how and where he or she can earn a living and therefore is in a good position to take risks.

Rigorous training in a professional discipline is the first step, for the techniques and methods of analysis that are learned have public-regarding values imbedded in them. Best at this socialization are the traditional professions, such as medicine, engineering, accounting, and law, all of which have clear minimum training requirements for membership, which often are internationally recognized. Economics also has imbedded public-regarding values, although it lacks recognized entry qualifications.[*]

The value socialization imparted in the process of professional education must be reinforced if it is to be sustained over time. The individuals who enter these professions must identify with them and look to their fellow professionals for reward. Traditionally the social processes of reinforcing professional values have taken place within national associations, which have met regularly, determined membership requirements, and expelled those who failed to maintain ethical and technical standards. In most of Africa, however, these professional bodies are still only weakly institutionalized and often have difficulty in resisting societal pressures by themselves. They need the fortification of involvement with international professionals to sustain their value and technical commitments. Formal and informal interactions by African professionals with their counterparts elsewhere, which expose them to judgments about their professional standards, are an important international contribution to the continent's development. At a minimum this internationalization of a profession must accord status and moral support to those who maintain high standards. Better still, it should provide channels to employment for those who find advancement at home blocked despite or because of their professionalism.

Conclusions​

The problem of public organizations in Kenya today is both one of management and one of policy; the two are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Some of the Kenya government's recent attempts to deal with these problems have been going in the wrong direction. By creating controls over management, it probably has been making administration worse. Managers to whom decisions can be delegated are needed instead. The focus needs to be on the selection of chief executives who

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can give appropriate direction to their organizations and inspire sufficient confidence in the president for him to give them the resources and policies they need. Only in this way can the state create the resources the president politically needs to distribute.

The kinds of executives needed are those who share the distinguishing attributes of the men we have studied. "Type A" personality attributes and the ability to give purpose to an organization are a common part of the folklore of executive success everywhere. Of greater interest are the attributes of political connections, professionalism, integrity, access to donor resources, skill at maintaining staff quality and commitment through the trials of Africanization, the institutionalization of competition, and the ability to take risks. These attributes have a distinctively African character, one that is consistent with the universal tenets of organization theory but which could not have been easily predicted from it.

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Source : African Successes
 
Numbisa said:
Ukoloni hauwezi kuisha Afrika.
Click to expand...

Chapter Three—
Growing Up and Out of Colonialism​

Source : African Successes
Nyandusi, Mule, Waicanguru, and Karanja could only accommodate to colonialism; their children were to supplant it. The older generation lent what support they could as their offspring scaled the steep pyramid of the colonial educational system and came out on top where, after independence, they could challenge the British for the management of the new state. The lives of the four future administrators we are studying were similar in this phase, but the ways they responded to the school system in this period presaged later differences in their careers.

Charles Kibe Karanja​

Karanja, the father of the tea administrator, had held out against the new forces of colonialism as long as he could. As the son of Kiarii, he was a man of wealth and status in traditional society, with 160 acres of prime land and five wives. Christianity and wage employment offered him no advantages; they only threatened the system in which he was already an elite. He did seek to expand the benefit of his assets and grew wattle for the export market. This very market involvement, however, ultimately led him to realize that he had underestimated the force of the changes taking place around him. It became clear that his family would have to adapt if it was to retain its privileged position. In 1939 he went to Thika to sell a truckload of wattle bark and felt that he was cheated in the sale because he could not read. After discussing the matter with Kiarii, his father, he decided that despite the dangers of Christianity that infected the schools, one of his children would have to learn how to read, so as to represent the family's financial interests. Among his sons,

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Kibe was obedient, had a good memory, and was interested, and so he was the one chosen.

Kibe wa Karanja was born in Karatu village of Ndarugu Location in Kiambu District in about 1931, the second child of Karanja's second wife, Njeri (more usually known by her nickname, Nyagitiri). As an adult, he would become general manager of the Kenya Tea Development Authority and be known as Charles Karanja.

Kibe was a very active child. At four he often followed his father to the field when he went to plant potatoes and tried unsuccessfully to imitate his digging with a panga (a machete). Nyagitiri trained her children when young to work, setting out two sticks and asking them to dig between them. As is common among the Kikuyu, friends used to compliment Nyagitiri on the child Kibe's brightness.

Kibe began his studies in September 1939 at the Ndarugu Out School of the Gospel Missionary Society, which later merged into the PCEA. To attend, he had to have special clothes, for the family of Karanja did not accept European dress. The head teacher took Karanja and young Kibe to a local shop, where they bought the shirt and shorts which constituted the school uniform.

When Karanja had decided to send Kibe to school, he gave the eight-year-old firm instructions that he must always obey his father and not become a Christian. The mission influence pervaded the schools in this era, however, and after only two years Kibe already was having doubts about traditional religious practices. In 1941, when Karanja slaughtered a goat for a Kikuyu ceremony, Kibe refused to eat it. Karanja in anger sent the boy off to tend the family's herd of goats while the other celebrants were eating. One hundred goats were beyond the capability of a ten-year-old, however, and unbeknownst to Kibe, some got away from him. Only when he was bringing the herd home at the end of the day did he see the wayward ones eating a neighbor's crops. He knew that he would be in trouble, and rather than face his father's wrath, he decided to run away.

He set out for a pyrethrum plantation where one of his father's relatives was a supervisor. It was two days' walk away, ten miles into the Aberdare Forest, and Kibe had to ask directions on the way, having never been there before. The first night he found himself at the forest's edge and asked someone to give him food and shelter. He knew there were wild animals in the forest and was afraid to go into it alone. He waited until another party passed along the path and then followed behind out of sight. Once there he got work through his relative for a wage of three shillings a month. After three weeks, however, Karanja got word of where he was and sent Kibe's older brother to fetch him home,

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promising that the boy would not be beaten. Kibe never did get any pay for his three weeks' work.

Back at home, Kibe refused to go back to Ndarugu School, being shy of returning to something he had left. So Karanja arranged for him to go to Mutunguru Kikuyu Independent School, where a cousin was headmaster. The independent schools had been set up to escape the missionary objections to female circumcision, and doubtless Karanja welcomed the idea of getting education for his son without more Christian contamination.

The school was farther away from home, however, and Kibe had to do the milking before he went. One day he was late and for his tardiness was given five strokes of the cane (switch). Coming home that day, he and a friend agreed to meet the following morning and get to school early. They arranged that the one who first passed a certain point on the way to school would leave a branch to let the other know that he should hurry to catch up with him. But the friend forgot to leave the branch, and Kibe walked slowly, thinking that he must be early. When he got to school he saw that he was late and knew that he would be caned. So instead he went to play. He played hooky for a week until the teacher complained to Karanja.

Kibe knew that his father would beat him, so this time he ran away to work on a coffee plantation 25 km (15 mi.) away. Once again he managed to stay only three weeks before he was brought home, but this time he returned with 2.15 shillings in earnings. He refused to return to school and instead stayed home to tend the sheep and goats and to master a new Kikuyu dance, the Muthuu. The dance was very popular among boys of that generation, involving bells tied to the legs and the twirling of imitation swords. Sometimes the boys would be paid to perform it as a praise dance for someone. Forty years later Kibe would still leap to his feet at the mention of the Muthuu to demonstrate its rhythm and basic steps.

In 1942 Karanja asked Kibe if he'd like to return to school, and he finally agreed. He was sent back to the mission school at Ndarugu where he had first begun. Kibe had settled down and become serious about his studies at this point, and the teacher had difficulty in deciding which class to place him in. In those days Africans received two years of preprimary school before they took the regulation Standards 1 and 2, after which they had to pass the first of a series of competitive exams before going further. The teacher decided to try Kibe in Standard 2, where he quickly rose to the head of the class. At the end of the year he took the exam that passed him out of the school.

For Standard 3 Kibe went to Ng'enda Primary School, which was too

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far away for him to live at home. The first term he stayed in a bungalow with other boys, and they cooked for themselves. The second term he stayed with a teacher, for whom he worked. For the third he lived with a friend nearby, whose mother cooked for them. Children were not "cared for" in boarding schools in this era.

At the end of Standard 3 Kibe took the Common Entrance Exam, on which he did extremely well, and was picked by interview to go to the Presbyterian Thogoto Primary School at Kikuyu. No more than ten of the class at Ng'enda were ever selected to go on, and Kibe's new school was the most prestigious in central Kenya. At every one of the frequent examination points, the educational pyramid narrowed considerably and the competition was intense.

When Kibe entered Thogoto at age thirteen in 1944, he found no one whom he knew, and students from as far away as Nyeri and Nakuru were there. In fact, he and Ishmael Muriithi (the veterinarian) did Standard 6 together in 1946. The annual fees, including board and uniforms, were eighty shillings ($16.15). Karanja was proud that, as a rich man, he was always able to pay the school fees for his children. (Many of his other offspring subsequently opted for education.) Many African youngsters have to drop out of school because of the inability of their families to pay their school fees; until relatively recently, others have been unable even to begin. The brightest poor students often get scholarships or are helped by their relatives with their fees. But if they have the kind of rocky beginning to their education that Kibe had, even the gifted youths can fall by the wayside if money is scarce for their families. Children whose parents are better off and clearly understand the importance of education to upward mobility in Kenyan society have a definite advantage in an otherwise meritocratic climb to the top.

There were seventy-two in the entering class and Kibe's class standing was forty-ninth in the first term and fiftieth in the second. At this point he realized that only fifty students were going to be permitted to continue to Standard 5. He was on the borderline, and he thought that if he were dropped, his father would decline to send him to another school. He was already working hard and didn't know how to improve. So he befriended the boy who was first in the class. He followed him absolutely everywhere he went, often without the other's realizing it. When he slept, Kibe slept; when he played, Kibe played; and most important, whenever he studied, Kibe studied. Kibe's class standing rose to twenty-sixth. From this experience he realized that he hadn't been studying as hard as he could, and in Standard 5 he spent most of his time reading. He finished that year in the top six in the class, and Standard 6 in the top ten. There were only a few whom he could never beat in school, among them Margaret Wambui, daughter of Jomo Kenyatta.

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Kibe was circumcised during the school holidays in August 1946, but he declined to participate in the traditional initiation education and the ceremony of "rebirth," for he felt he was a Christian. Karanja accepted this affront to his beliefs because Kibe was the only boy from the area who had been able to reach such prestigious heights in the educational system. When Kibe was baptized into the church he took the name Charles and became officially known as Charles Kibe Karanja. In this way his given name was subtly transformed into a middle initial, and he has since been known as Charles Karanja, confusing him somewhat with his father among the Kikuyu. The same happened to Harris Mutio Mule. Ishmael Muriithi and Simeon Nyachae dealt with the dilemmas of English naming conventions by assuming their given names as their surnames.

Charles Kibe Karanja took the Kenya African Primary Examination (KAPE) in November 1946 and passed well with nine points. He had applied to go to the elite Alliance High School, however, and when he was turned down there, he was offered admission at an agricultural training school instead. He declined the place, for his father said that agricultural instructors and teachers never become rich.

Instead, he looked for a school in which he could repeat Standard 6 and the exam and was accepted at St. Mary's Primary School, Lioki. While he was there a protest developed over the food they were being given—maize without the accompanying beans to which the Kikuyu are accustomed. Other boys called a meeting to discuss a strike, at which Kibe spoke forcefully in favor of the action. He and his cohorts went home in protest, but after two weeks Kibe's father sent him back to see what had happened. He found that all the others had already returned and been disciplined. Furthermore, someone had told the headmaster of his protest speech. He received eight strokes of the cane and as a result decided never again to join a strike.

This time he passed very well, with fifteen points, but he had decided not to risk application to the Protestant Alliance High School again. Thus he was one of five boys in his class of fifty at St. Mary's who was selected to go to the nearly as prestigious Catholic equivalent, Mangu High School. This pair of school choices inclined Charles Karanja away from the Presbyterians and toward the Roman Catholic church, which he joined at Mangu in 1949. Even his father, Karanja wa Kiarii, in his very old age was eventually baptized into the faith. Charles Karanja, the only one of the four administrators whose parents were not Christian, was also the only one who attended church frequently as an adult. It is unusual for well-educated Africans to be regular church attenders, even for those such as Ishmael Muriithi (the veterinarian) who took their membership seriously.[1]

When Charles Karanja entered Mangu High School, near Thika, in

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January 1948, his class consisted of but twenty-five boys, the whole school of only a hundred. Most of them were destined for elite positions in Kenyan society. (See plate 10.) Mwai Kibaki, who later became vice-president of Kenya, was in the class ahead of him, a class that ultimately produced ten medical doctors as well. A tight network of friendships, cutting across district and ethnic boundaries, was formed during these years. (This phenomenon was somewhat less characteristic of the later generations of educational elites, who passed through a broader, less selective funnel and who therefore more often attended schools near home with others of their ethnic group.) These networks of "old school boys" were frequently quite important to Kenyan policy-making.

At Mangu Charles was the best debater in his class, ran for Kiambu in an athletics meet in Nyeri in 1951, and played on the second string of the football team. The game was played without shoes, and he complained that this hurt his toes. He conformed strictly to the school rules and went through four years without ever being punished, which was very unusual. As a consequence he was made first a prefect and then deputy head prefect in his final year. Prefects were appointed by the school administration and were an important part of the way in which these schools sought to socialize future elites in the exercise of authority.[2] Charles was an effective and hard disciplinarian.

The pattern of selective national exams continued at Mangu, with one after two years and the Ordinary Level School Certificate at the end of four. (See fig. 3.1.) All the remaining members of his class passed the latter, but Charles was one of only eight who was in the First Division. Nonetheless, he could not go to the elite Makerere College in Uganda. He had received only a Pass on the English-language portion of the exam. This was ironic, for he was among the top in the subject at Mangu, and his essays were often read in class. He had misinterpreted a key essay question on the exam and because of that error lost his chance to pursue a career in the social sciences or humanities.

He went instead to the Kampala (Uganda) Engineering School for a five-year diploma course in civil engineering in 1952. (No degree programs of any kind were available for Africans in East Africa until 1954.) This too was a prestigious course; there were those who were accepted at Makerere who opted for the Engineering School instead. At one point all of the African engineers in the Kenyan Ministry of Works had been through it. The course was a rigorous, practical one, teaching applied rather than pure science. The students studied surveying and the construction of buildings, roads, and water supplies, doing a great deal of practical work in the process. Charles finished somewhere in the upper half of his class.

He held a number of school offices while at Kampala. He was elected

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image

[Full Size]


Fig. 3.1
The Kenyan colonial education system for Africans
NOTE: The Kenyan African educational system was in flux in the colonial period, and the
requirements and names of various stages shifted at some points. The above is a
modal picture of the system.

class representative to the school's Student Club in his first year, was reelected each subsequent year, and was unanimously selected as president in his final year. At one point he served as catering officer for the students and at others was president of the Debating Society and of the Catholic student group. Charles's love of office and speaking were such that he and many of his classmates expected him to run for Parliament one day, something that in fact never came to pass.

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Mau Mau from Kiambu​

This aptitude for politics did not lead Charles Karanja to involvement in the struggles sweeping his homeland during his school years. The simmering revolt of the Kikuyus against their restricted access to land and colonialism's white domination finally led to the declaration of a state of emergency by the colonial government in 1952. Central Province was effectively placed under military occupation, and Kikuyus were repatriated to their homes from jobs in the urban areas and the "White Highlands." Many fled into the forests to fight a guerrilla war, and thousands of others were put in detention for their suspected involvement. Kikuyus themselves were bitterly divided between those who supported the Mau Mau (now known as the freedom fighters) and the Home Guards. The latter assisted the British to suppress the uprising because of the Mau Mau's brutality and rejection of both Christian and traditional religious values.[3]

Karanja wa Kiarii and his family, however, remained uninvolved in the struggle. No member of the family either took the Mau Mau oath or identified with the Home Guards. Many of the wealthy Kikuyu were able to escape without ever being forced by either side to commit themselves. Some of Karanja wa Kiarii's land was taken over for a "strategic hamlet" type of village, into which the Kikuyus were herded to keep them from the guerrillas. But he was subsequently compensated for this loss during the process of land registration and consolidation that the British forced on the Kikuyu as part of the pacification effort.

Charles Karanja himself was never asked to take the oath. There seems to have been a tacit decision on the part of the Mau Mau not to involve the Kikuyu student elite, so as to speed them on their way to the education that would eventually pose a different type of challenge to the British. And because of that disengagement the government did not disrupt the progress of Kikuyus in school. Charles Karanja was even able to discuss politics in Uganda to an extent that would have been dangerous in Kenya. He was harassed somewhat while at home for the holidays, but not overly much. He is unusually dark for a Kikuyu and so generally wasn't taken for one as long as he kept quiet. He was detained in a Mau Mau screening camp for two weeks when he finished at Kampala, but was released when he persuaded the Home Guard elders that he had never taken the oath. In his own words, "As a tribe we suffered, but I didn't personally."

After graduation Charles Karanja married Philomena Ndanga on December 22, 1956. Her father was a court elder, like Elijah Waicanguru and Philip Mule, and her grandfather had been a chief. Karanja had met her at a Catholic church near his home in 1949. She went to Loreto Convent, Limuru, for her secondary education. She qualified as a

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primary-school teacher in 1953 and started teaching early in 1954. In October of that year she bore Charles a son. In accordance with Kikuyu custom, Charles's father paid a dowry to her parents of a thousand shillings, two heifer calves, and five lambs. It was mutually agreed that the actual marriage had to be postponed until after Charles Karanja's graduation at the end of November 1956.

With marriage and graduation Charles assumed a position as engineering assistant in Nakuru with the Ministry of Works, which had given him a full bursary (scholarship) at Kampala. His education was extended further in 1961 when the Kenya government decided to provide scholarships for Africans with his qualifications to go oversees for an engineering degree. He was sent to the University of Toronto in Canada, without his wife and family, which by then consisted of four children. The combination of homesickness for his family and excitement at Kenya's impending independence led him to abort his degree program after one year and to return home in August 1962. This decision effectively ended Charles Karanja's chances of ever reaching the highest engineering positions in the Kenya government.

Karanja's school years exhibited his willfulness, ambition, and love for public roles. They also brought him to an acceptance of authority and gave him practice in its exercise. His mistaken reading of a single essay question on the English portion of the Secondary School Certificate exam, by precluding his study of the social sciences, consigned him to a technical career.

Simeon Nyachae​

Chief Secretary Simeon Nyachae's early years were spent with his mother. He was later to remark, "In a polygamous home the women tend to take hold of the children [especially when they are young], leaving the father nowhere." As Nyachae grew up he became unusually close to his father, but in the years before his schooling he belonged to his mother. Pauline Bosibori had but two children, and James Oiruria was only two years older than Nyachae. The two brothers were very close. Nyachae was brighter, more aggressive, and more talkative (like his mother), so that he tended to dominate Oiruria. But whatever conflicts they had were quickly compromised in their friendship. These earliest years included ones on the mission station while their mother was learning to read.

When Nyachae was about eight years old his father employed a teacher for several of his boys at his home. After a year or so, in 1941, Musa Nyandusi sent Nyachae and Oiruria to begin their formal education at Nyanchwa Primary School, which was run by the Seventh-Day

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Adventists. During these years the boys lived at home, and Pauline Bosibori watched over their education. She would punish them with a switch if they missed classes, and she drilled them on their arithmetic. The boys would cry if they got a sum wrong and laugh if it was right. Because they had a literate mother, Oiruria and Nyachae got more help at home with their education than was usual for those of their generation. Simeon Nyachae was the timekeeper at Nyanchwa, the one who hand rings the bell that signals the start and end of classes. There would be twenty to thirty children in a class at Nyanchwa. All writing was done with chalk on wood-frame slates. The first several years of primary education were in the local vernacular, after which teaching in Swahili (East Africa's Bantu lingua franca) was begun. Instruction in English began in intermediate school. All the national examination hurdles through which Kenyan children pass were (and still are) taken in Swahili or English. A gift for languages therefore is a prerequisite to education in Kenya.

In 1947 the two brothers and two of Nyandusi's other sons graduated to intermediate school and were sent to Kereri. It was too far away for the boys to stay at home, so Nyandusi arranged a place for them with Stephen Obure, an African Native Council employee whose son much later became a member of Parliament from Kisii. Nyachae left his brother behind at Kereri in 1949 and joined the Kisii government African High School, which was built on land donated by his father. This secondary school was not as cosmopolitan as those attended by Karanja, Mule, and Muriithi, for only 20 percent of its students came from outside Kisii District. Chief Nyandusi would visit the school regularly to check on his son's progress, until Nyachae terminated his secondary education in 1953.

During his school years Nyachae excelled in athletics. He was first in Nyanza Province in the hurdles and the long jump, and his record in the latter stood for thirteen years. He ran the 100- and 440-yard dashes as well, but he did not play football (soccer). When he was young he had hit his head on a goalpost playing the game, and his father forbade his further participation in the sport.

Most of Musa Nyandusi's sons did poorly in school. This was common for the children of chiefs, unlike the other African elites. The chiefs were more likely to be polygamous and to have illiterate wives. Their many children also suffered from being too visibly close to wealth and power, and so they often would be bossy, flash money around, and fail to apply themselves seriously to their studies. Given the extreme competitiveness of education in that generation, this lack of attention was fatal to their progress. Simeon Nyachae was different; he was bright, more serious about his studies, and less affected by his father's status.

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Nyandusi's first son, Ayako, had also done well in school, and the chief had hoped that he would succeed him in office, although the post was not hereditary. Ayako died in 1951, however, and Musa Nyandusi increasingly came to focus on Nyachae. He would take him in his car to meetings, send him round to collect the money from his several flour mills, and delegate him to report on coffee Cooperative Society meetings.

Although Nyachae did well in school, he was more of an all-rounder than a scholar. It appeared to his teachers that his maturity was ahead of his academic development. Thus some of them concurred with Musa Nyandusi when he withdrew Nyachae from the system in 1953 when he was a year shy of the secondary Ordinary Level School Certificate exam. Nyandusi felt that a higher education was unnecessary for the chief's career that he wanted for his son. (See fig. 3.1.)

In 1954 Nyachae began work as a district clerk, stationed in Nyaribari Location where his father was chief. In effect he was being apprenticed. During the time that he worked there he was sent for some basic administrative courses at Maseno Government Training Institute.

In 1954 the elders also helped him select a wife, Esther Nyaboke, who came from a prominent family in a neighboring clan, was sixteen years old, and had gone as far as Standard 4 in primary school. Later that year she bore him a daughter. She was ultimately to bear him several more children, including sons.[*] But in the first years of the marriage the elders were concerned that the couple had not had a son. The elders and Musa Nyandusi put considerable pressure on Nyachae to take a second wife, which he did in 1955. This wife, Druscilla Kerubo, died three months after she gave birth to a daughter, who was then reared in her early years by her grandmother, Pauline Bosibori.

In 1957 Nyachae took as his wife Martha Mwango, who like Esther was sixteen at the time and had left school after Standard 4. She came from another prominent family and was the half-sister of Lawrence Sagini, who was a close friend and adviser to Nyachae and later became Kisii's first member of Parliament. Sagini's influence was important in gaining consent for the marriage, for Martha was to have the lower status of being a second wife. Between 1958 and 1975 Martha gave Nyachae several more children.

Both of these wives remained in Kisii when Nyachae moved to a national-level career in 1960. He himself feels that his polygamy was a mistake, that a father cannot give adequate attention to a family of this

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nature, and that there is a danger that his children will be emotionally lost to him. The marriages of these years reflected the image his father and the elders held of the type of wives that were appropriate to a chief. He himself would never say so, but these women clearly were not ideally suited to help him in the national arena in which he was to operate subsequently. Polygamy at least enabled him to marry more advantageously later without severing his responsibilities to his early wives through divorce.

By 1957 it was evident to both Nyachae and Musa Nyandusi that they had made a mistake in renouncing his higher education. Ghana won its independence from Great Britain in that year, and it was clear that able Africans could aspire to considerably higher offices than that of chief. His mother, Pauline Bosibori, dreamed that Nyachae would not become a chief, and he himself was quite upset when his friend and brother-in-law, Sagini, won a scholarship to pursue his B.A. in the United States.

With the help of the district commissioner and Robert LeVine, an American anthropologist, Nyachae found a place at South Devon Technical College at Torquay in the United Kingdom, where he could pursue a one-year Diploma in Public and Social Administration. To get him there Musa Nyandusi shrewdly insisted on raising assistance for his expenses through the African District Council (of which he was vice-chair) so that Nyachae and the Gusii would both feel that he had an obligation to serve them in administration.

Torquay was a relatively small and provincial college of three thousand in those days, and its public-administration program was designed for those who would serve in local governments and the middle levels of welfare administration. Those who were expected to hold the highest administrative posts in Great Britain and the colonies would have studied instead at Oxford or Cambridge. The particular program in which Nyachae participated was designed for students from the colonies; a group photo from the period shows Nyachae with students from Sarawak, Zambia, Borneo, and Malawi. (See plate 11.) The curriculum covered the geography of developing countries, community economics, social policy, law, government, and administration. The things that struck Nyachae about the program were the comparisons of administrative systems that it offered and the openness to criticism of British government. Visits to farms, local council debates, and central ministries were frequent.[4] His "digs" were with a local family. The amount, quality, and breadth of Nyachae's education were limited, compared with the other three managers and with most of those who achieved the most senior administrative (as opposed to political) positions in independent Kenya.

Upon his return to Kenya, Nyachae became a district assistant in the Provincial Administration. This position was the African equivalent of

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the district officer, the office that an Englishman first held on entry to this elite cadre, which was responsible for the general administration of the colony. Through Nyandusi's influence Nyachae's first posting was to Kisii. There his main duties were assisting the cooperative movement, supervising the traditional courts, and facilitating the expansion of education. More schools were needed as the political struggle for independence burst out of the strictures of the Emergency. But the missions, which were still the primary vehicle for education, had difficulty in getting land. Nyachae spent a great deal of time working with the District Education Board to get land set aside for the purpose. He also supervised Kisii's four tribunal courts, making sure that their application of customary law did not contradict the Penal or Civil Procedure Codes. As a district assistant, he had the powers of a third-class magistrate and could overturn certain classes of cases. Others could be referred to the district commissioner in his capacity as a first-class magistrate. The colonial Provincial Administration combined aspects of the executive, legislative, and judicial functions in its governance of Africans. In Kisii, though adjustments to fines were common, it was rare for the Provincial Administration to have to overturn a tribunal court decision.

Nyachae wanted to move out from under his father's wing and finally succeeded in getting transferred out of Kisii in 1960. He was posted to Ukwala in Siaya District, a Luo area. There was tension between the Luos and the Gusii at the time, and Nyachae did not feel comfortable administering the Luo; he resigned immediately. He became instead the labor and welfare officer and the first African in management of the East African Breweries. Musa Nyandusi's shrewdness in asking council assistance for Nyachae's studies in the U.K. became evident at this point. A delegation of eight Kisii chiefs, including Nyandusi, was sent to Nairobi, and Nyachae was summoned to the office of the chief native commissioner. Under great pressure Nyachae finally consented to rejoin the Provincial Administration, but only on condition that he not be sent back to Ukwala.

The Political Struggle for Independence​

In November 1961 Nyachae was posted to Kangundo Division in Machakos District, where he served first as a district assistant and then as the district officer for the division. This was one of the more difficult Provincial Administration postings in Kenya at the time because it was a center of agitation against British rule.

The earliest forms of resistance to colonialism had been directed against the state itself. However, beginning with what are known as the Harry Thuku riots of 1922,[5] protest turned to a demand for increased rights for Africans within the state. Jomo Kenyatta, a nationalist Kikuyu,

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was the leader of this struggle from the late 1920s, even during his extended stays in England.[6] As the people most disrupted and changed by colonialism, the Kikuyu played a leading role in the accelerating progress of African nationalism, and it was among them that the Mau Mau uprising occurred. From the 1930s, however, Kenyatta had used the vehicle, first, of the Kikuyu Central Association, and second, of his Kenya African Union (KAU) to spread the nationalist gospel among the country's other peoples. Although Kenyatta denied to his death that either he or the KAU had any involvement in Mau Mau, he and five other officers of the KAU were detained when the State of Emergency was declared. Among those so imprisoned without trial or sentence was Paul Ngei, a Kamba who would serve in the independent country's cabinet into the 1980s. Kangundo, to which Nyachae was posted, was his home.

During the time of the Emergency, African politics were heavily restricted, especially in Central Province. Country wide African political parties were banned, for example, and the district-level parties that were permitted contributed to the fragmented, ethnic politics that were to trouble Kenya after independence.[7] Men such as Tom Mboya used the labor movement and other vehicles to keep the struggle for African political rights alive with a momentum that accelerated through the 1950s despite (or perhaps because of) the Emergency.[8] African demand for the vote and the end of colonialism became genuinely nationwide, and political participation was truly a mass movement. By the end of the decade it was evident that universal suffrage, majority rule, African governance, and independence were on the horizon. As a result of sustained pressure by the "legal" African nationalist parties, Jomo Kenyatta and the rest of the KAU executive were released from detention in August 1961. An African coalition government was formed in 1962 under the authority of the colonial governor.[9][*] With full internal self-government coming in 1963, the air was filled with excited anticipation on the part of Africans and with dread anxiety from Europeans and those who had supported their colonial endeavor.

Kangundo was Paul Ngei's constituency as well as his home, and he did nothing to ease the task of the colonial administration during this difficult time of transition. People were expecting to be given land for free and therefore were refusing to cooperate in settlement schemes in which they would be expected to pay. Kenyatta had not yet given his "no free things" speech, and Ngei was encouraging people not to buy. The colonial chiefs were deeply unpopular and subject to constant harassment. A great deal of the antagonism was directed at the senior chief,

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Uku, who was taking a hard line in his insistence on order. Having a senior chief for a father himself, Nyachae was sympathetic to the chiefs and gave them public backing. But he also recognized the forces of change at work and tried to turn the uncompromising ones such as Uku from their self-destructive course. Even at this early stage in his career Nyachae seemed to have his characteristic ability to sort out the essential from the peripheral objectives and to be unbending in his pursuit of the former and flexible about the latter.

In these times it was imperative to be in close touch with the people, particularly as Nyachae was frustrated by Ngei's unwillingness to listen to reason. "A leader is bound to be able to listen carefully to what other people are saying and [Nyachae] was of that caliber. He would think carefully before deciding." Public meetings (barazas ) did not work as a means of communication. As Nyachae recalls:

It is extremely misleading to go to a public meeting and see people clapping. It doesn't mean that they are convinced. . . . We traveled in the countryside and slept in tents to let them understand me and vice versa. . . . We had the best understanding when we walked. Though we have more administrators now, they do not understand the ordinary people the way we did. The most effective communication is to visit in their homes.
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He remained in Kangundo Division for only six months, too short a period to have a real impact on it, but he considered the experience to be a seminal one in his career. From it he understood what field administration really means and that independence would bring problems as well as prospects.

Nyachae's next assignment was to the Kenya Institute of Administration, where he took the district officer's course. There he took the law exam and qualified as a first-class magistrate, a role which at the time was combined with that of district commissioner. That course and the one on colonial administration to which he was sent in 1963 at Cambridge University were also designed to socialize the new recruits into their roles as their colonial predecessors had understood them. In addition to training in the law and administrative practice, there was instruction in small arms, horseback riding, and table manners. These courses symbolized the kind of administrative and social role they were expected to play in Kenyan society. The socialization process was clearly rushed, and one would have expected its impact to be diminished as a result. For example, Nyachae was able to stay for only six of the nine required months at Cambridge because the Kenyan government needed him. But the instruction had its effect nonetheless. The law-and-order component of the role remained the primary concern of the Africans inducted into the Provincial Administration in this period, and they re-

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sisted attempts by a later generation of expatriate administrative trainers to shift the courses decisively toward the primacy of a developmental role by stressing economics, sociology, and planning.[10] Although many of them were strong supporters of economic and social development, they firmly believed that it could be achieved only if law and order were maintained, and they considered the latter their first priority.

How were the British administrators able to socialize their successors into a law-and-order orientation when they failed to transmit many of the other values they held dear? First of all, this was the role to which they actually gave primacy, whatever their intentions. Actions speak louder than words, and the Provincial Administration had just emerged from a period of intense effort to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion. Second, the law-and-order role not only was the one their first superiors expected them to play, it also was the one they had been able to observe from afar as they were growing up. It was a role in which many of their parents had assisted, and the public expected them to play it when they put on the Provincial Administration uniform. Third, the role met the requirements of the newly independent African state. Despite the sincere rhetoric of development which African politicians used, they were most concerned with the survival of the regime itself in the face of deep interethnic conflicts and dangerously inflated expectations.[11] They perceived the new state as needing security even more than it needed prosperity, and they rewarded careers accordingly. Thus the traditional role expectations of the Provincial Administration were reinforced from all directions.

Between the Kenya Institute of Administration and the Cambridge courses Nyachae also served briefly in Makweni Division of Machakos District. During this period Nyachae had a serious accident in his Land Rover, which left him with recurrent back troubles. When Nyachae returned to the Provincial Administration from Cambridge, England, in March 1964, he was to face the challenge of governing an independent, not a colonial, Kenya.

Nyachae's entire upbringing aimed him toward the Provincial Administration and its law-and-order orientation. His father's example and wishes so inclined him, and his early withdrawal from secondary school precluded more professional options.

Ishmael Muriithi​

Ishmael Muriithi, the veterinarian, was born on November 18, 1929, at Kindara village of Ihithe Sub-Location, Thigingi Location, in Nyeri District. (See plate 12.) In December he was baptized into the Presbyterian church. His childhood was an uneventful and typical one. He played,

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assisted in the care of his younger brothers and sisters, and helped to tend the livestock. From an early age he enjoyed looking after the farm's animals, worried about them when they were sick, and was so quick and good at milking that none of the cows he worked ever got mastitis.

He started school at what was then the relatively young age of eight, spent a year first at Ihithe Primary School and then went on to Wandumbi in the same sub-location. He was very serious about his studies; he never objected to doing his homework, was always on time for school, and took coaching from his father.

Muriithi did well on the Common Entrance Examination and was accepted at the PCEA Thogoto Primary School at Kikuyu in Kiambu District in 1943. (See fig. 3.1.) A younger brother who would later join him in veterinary work, Dan Mbogo, was born in the same year. There was a famine in the province at the time, and there was some concern that he might not be able to get enough to eat at Thogoto, but Muriithi insisted on going anyway. His father, Elijah Waicanguru, was already a man of substance and had no trouble meeting the school fees for his children's educational careers. Nonetheless, Muriithi always used well the money he was given, not splurging it, as did many other sons of the well-to-do. He also did not allow the status of being in such an elite school go to his head. At home on the holidays he helped with harvesting, weeding, cutting the firewood, milking, terracing, and so on. In later years he would be unusual in insisting on the same farm-work discipline for his own children. During the Christmas holidays he joined the carollers singing from house to house in the village. He also led a choir that performed throughout the district.

Muriithi's first sitting of the Kenya African Primary Examination was not up to his ambitions, and he repeated the year at Thogoto, joining the class of Charles Karanja. His father wanted to send him to another school, but the headmaster argued that the boy was working hard and had just had bad luck. Among his teachers at Thogoto was James Gichuru, who was later to be central in the formation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and a cabinet minister. Muriithi did much better on the 1946 exam; his certificate shows four passes and four credits, including the crucial ones in English and mathematics.

He entered Alliance High, the elite Protestant school, in 1947. Six years earlier Alliance had become the first Kenyan school to offer four years of secondary education to Africans.[12] (Makerere was in Uganda.) Muriithi was an "all-rounder" at Alliance. He played on the first eleven for football (soccer) and developed a lifelong love for tennis. He also was recognized for his leadership abilities; he became a prefect in 1949 and was made senior prefect of Wilberforce House in 1950. The prefects were responsible for the organization and discipline of the school-

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boys, and he made his house something to reckon with in school activities. In the weekly meetings of senior prefects, "his was not the sort of mind who dithered. He formed his opinions quickly, expressed his views forcefully and stood by them." He was also a very down-to-earth person. Each house had its own garden, and forty years later a classmate could still "see him wearing his pink working shirt and his jembe [hoe] on his shoulder going to and from the shamba."

Alliance High School was a very special place in those years, offering, together with Mangu, the highest education available to Africans in Kenya at the time. A contemporary remarks:

To even go there was a very major achievement. . . . It was a wonderful life—we had water regularly, uniforms, highly trained English teachers, . . . sporting facilities, . . . and the opportunity to play the piano. . . . We enjoyed special privileges such as a special coach on the train [when we went home to Nyeri for the holidays].
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The "Old Boys" who went to Alliance in these years were disproportionately represented in the administrative leadership of Kenya after independence. Their mutual respect for one another's accomplishments and their network of friendships and acquaintanceships often facilitated the business of government. Muriithi was greatly helped in later years, for example, by the fact that he spent 1947 and 1948 at Alliance with Geoffrey Kariithi, who later held the powerful post of head of the civil service under President Kenyatta.

Under the legendary leadership of Carey Francis, Alliance was modeled on the ideals of service by Christian gentlemen which underlay the English public (i.e., prep) school. Discipline was extremely strict, and the style of leadership authoritarian. Francis identified deeply with his students and with African progress, but he held views on matters such as politics and salary differentials between Africans and Europeans that his charges deeply resented at times. Thus the gap between the students and their schoolmasters was greater than in the English public schools after which Alliance was modeled.[13] A classmate of Muriithi's observed:

Alliance was a mixture of conflicting relationships. . . . There we were the cream and here were people who had given up great opportunities back home [in England] to come to Kenya to educate the black people. But there was a social gap, not hostility but an enormous gap [all the same]. They would invite us to their homes from time to time, but you never developed totally free rapport.
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They had in their own minds stereotyped professions for which they were preparing us—teaching, medicine, [the] civil service, [the] ministry, agriculture, and veterinary [medicine]. It never occurred to them that
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some of us could decide to go and do law or join a private firm. . . . That set of values was being ingrained in us. . . . A lot of emphasis [was placed] on public service. The motto of Alliance is "Strong to Serve."
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Carey Francis visited Muriithi's home in Nyeri, as he did with many of "his boys."[14] He and Elijah Waicanguru had a particular respect for each other, which Muriithi used to his advantage later. When Muriithi finished Makerere in 1956, his father, Chief Muhoya, and the Nyeri district commissioner put pressure on him to join the Provincial Administration. Muriithi used Carey Francis's advice to defend his commitment to the veterinary profession.

Muriithi showed a strong preference for the sciences in his schoolwork. He was much interested in nature and enjoyed the practical work of the labs. He was even a natural at dissecting frogs, which repelled many of the others, as, traditionally, frogs are not even touched. But English was a different matter. He hated writing essays. He did not want to elaborate on something once he'd said it, occasioning constant arguments between him and his English master. A classmate remarked, "If I found something [today in his office] files of over two pages, I'd be surprised if it was his [writing]."

In 1950 at the end of his stay at Alliance, Muriithi got a First Division pass on the Cambridge School Certificate Examination, which was set from Britain. Despite, or maybe because of, the predictions that he would fail in English, his seven credits included one in English. Thus he was one of an even more elite group who entered Uganda's Makerere College in 1951, in his case to pursue a Diploma in Veterinary Medicine, which he received in 1956.

The first years of the course were held in Kampala, and the final two in Kenya at Kabete, on the site of the University of Nairobi's present veterinary faculty and next door to the headquarters of the Veterinary Department. These years corresponded with the Kikuyu Mau Mau uprising and the State of Emergency.

Muriithi's father, Elijah Waicanguru, was a colonial civil servant, a member of the Home Guards who assisted in putting down the rebellion, and enjoyed government protection from the insurgents. But no Kikuyu escaped from the Emergency untouched or emotionally unscarred. Waicanguru was based at the courts in Nyeri town and thus was somewhat removed from the forest and the greatest action. Lydia Wangeci, Muriithi's mother, stayed on the family homestead at Ihithe, however, and was very near to the Aberdare Mountains, where the insurgents hid. At one point she had fifty people staying with her in the house, as the government forced the populace back from the forest edge

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into fortified villages, which were sealed at night. Peter Nderitu, the second child in the family, who was working in Nakuru, had to return to Nyeri because of the general repatriation of Kikuyus from the urban areas in the State of Emergency.

The chief of the Location was killed by the insurgents in 1952 when he tried to disrupt a Mau Mau oathing ceremony.[15] The family lost only four sheep to the insurgents during the whole period of the rebellion, but by 1953 they were concerned for their security, and Waicanguru had Muriithi's younger brother Dan Mbogo transfer from primary school in Ihithe to Nyeri town, where he could be with him. The contradictions and complicated allegiances of the period are revealed by the ten-year-old boy's decision to use the opportunity to smuggle medicines regularly from a dresser at Nyeri Hospital through the guarded checkpoints to a Mau Mau courier. As the son of a government judge, he was never suspected or searched, and his parents never knew of his activities.

At one point the government considered having the Kikuyu students expelled from Makerere because of fears that they might be involved with Mau Mau. Elijah Waicanguru and Senior Chief Muhoya interceded on their behalf with the district commissioner for Nyeri, arguing that it was impossible that they were involved, as under Kikuyu custom only an adult could take an oath. Given Mbogo's assistance to the insurgents and the many ways in which the Mau Mau broke with Kikuyu custom, this was hardly a definitive argument, but in any case no mass expulsions took place. Instead, two police officers were sent to Makerere to uncover those involved with the rebellion. Kikuyus were subjected to grueling interviews, and several of them lost their scholarships and had to go home. Others developed ulcers from the tension. Open dissent was dangerous, and so opposition at Makerere tended to take petty, symbolic forms. Muriithi grew a beard during these years, so that "he looked fierce, like a terrorist." He also joined Mwai Kibaki (later vice-president) in refusing to stand for the singing of "God Save the Queen."

The age of the four administrators was such that it was difficult for them to join directly in nationalist activity without sacrificing their careers. This was particularly true for the Kikuyus among them, for under the Emergency political activity became legal only after 1957. Perhaps they could have done more than they did; Mwai Kibaki was their contemporary and launched his political career in late 1960. But they did see themselves as participating in the struggle for independence. They saw their education and careers as preparing them for the management of the new state and enabling them to challenge the British on another part of the battlefield in the larger struggle. Perhaps this view was self-serving, but it was sincere and was encouraged by many of their elders and peers. It gave a larger purpose to their ambitions and created an

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ambivalence and tension in their relationships with their English instructors.

In 1954 as Muriithi was traveling to Nyeri on the special train coach for African students, he met Martha Wangui Munene, who had just begun at Alliance Girls High School. They met again at home on another school holiday and started writing to each other. Muriithi began pressing her to marry him after he finished his diploma in 1956, but he was eight years older and she had finished her School Certificate only in that year. She insisted that she not be married until she was trained. She went to Siriba Teacher Training College for a diploma, which she completed in late 1958. They were married on December 12, 1959, after she had taught for a year in Embu.

Muriithi began work as a veterinary officer in Kigumo Division, Murang'a District, in 1957, shortly after he finished Makerere. Following in his father's footsteps, he was deeply interested in the dairy industry for the high-rainfall highland areas (which are known as the "high potential" zones). The white settlers had introduced artificial insemination for their cattle in the late 1930s, and Muriithi brought the practice to Kigumo as a way of upgrading the quality of the traditional African Zebu cattle and increasing milk production. After a short time he was transferred to Githunguri Division in Kiambu. There too he concentrated on the incipient African dairy industry and began artificial insemination.

At one point the colonial governor made an official inspection of African agriculture in Kiambu. Muriithi was responsible for part of the tour. The English provincial commissioner wanted the governor to visit the farm of Harry Thuku, an early African nationalist who had become a supporter of the colonial order after his several years in detention. Muriithi refused, on the grounds that he wanted the governor to see real farmers. He proposed a more typical farmer who was making exceptional progress, but the provincial commissioner opposed this choice on the grounds that the man was known as a Mau Mau sympathizer. In any case, when Muriithi joined the governor's party, he took it to the dissident farmer. Ishmael Muriithi had a stubborn determination to promote an African livestock industry and he ignored colonial political sensitivities in doing so.

In August 1960 Muriithi was surprised to learn that he was to go to Scotland to study for a full degree in veterinary medicine at Edinburgh. (See plate 13.) At first he thought the news was a joke, for the school year was about to start. But a joke it was not. The British veterinarians in Kenya did not consider the Makerere diploma the equivalent of their own degrees. Other Makerere veterinarians were sent to the United States or India for upgrading, but Muriithi was selected for the honor of receiving the rigorous training through which they themselves had

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passed. At the time this honor appeared questionable, for Muriithi was made to spend four of the normal five years at Edinburgh, whereas those who went to the United States received greater credit for their Makerere work and took only an additional two years to get their degrees. It is clear, however, that the Edinburgh imprimatur was later critical to his selection by his British superiors to succeed them as director of the Veterinary Department.

On September 4, 1960, Ishmael and Martha's first child, Ann Wangeci, was born, and two weeks later Muriithi left for Scotland. No money was provided for Martha to go with her husband; she finished the year in the teaching job that she had secured in Githunguri and then went to live with Ishmael's parents in Nyeri. The following year she managed to win a Commonwealth scholarship for herself to take a primary-school teaching course at Mary House in Edinburgh and joined Ishmael in September 1961, leaving her daughter with Elijah and Lydia Waicanguru in Kenya. Though the scholarship was only for a year, she managed to stay on until May 1963, giving birth on October 1, 1962, to Elijah Waicanguru.

Muriithi was disappointed that he was given very little credit for the work that he had done at Makerere and was somewhat resentful of it throughout his life. He was made to begin the first term with the entering British students, but by the end of October he had been able to test out of all the first-year courses except for physics and began the second-year syllabus, shortening the five-year program to four. Included were internships with private practices in Wales and Scotland. In the end he graduated in May 1964 with a prize and was often considered the top student in his class.

Martha had returned to Kenya a year earlier, driven out by the coldest winter in eighty years and by housing difficulties. Their landlord was a Polish refugee who was willing to let to foreign students but who complained about the noise that little Elijah was making while he was teething. They tried to get another flat but were unable to do so "because we were Africans. When they heard your voice or saw your face they would say no."

His school years gave Muriithi the valuable Edinburgh imprimatur and training in decision making. They also registered his love for the sciences, his ill ease with writing, and his willingness to get his hands dirty in his work.

Dan Mbogo​

The experience of Muriithi's brother Dan Mbogo at a later day and in a different part of the world represents an interesting counterpoint. Dan performed solidly in school, but not brilliantly, as had his eldest brother.

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His primary education was in local schools, where he had to repeat Standards 1 and 4. From there he went to the second-echelon Kigumo Secondary School, from which he got a good Division II pass (in contrast to his brother's First) on the Ordinary Level fourth-year exam, doing especially well in the sciences.

Mbogo could have gone on for the two additional secondary years necessary for the Advanced Certificate had it not been for the misfortune of a school riot. His class created a disturbance two days before the end of school, and someone falsely accused him of having participated. As a consequence, the school to which he had hoped to go to study science refused to accept him. In fact, he was the school librarian and had been checking the books and turning over his office to his successor on that day. But by the time the charges against him had been refuted, it was too late to undo the damage for that year. Another school offered to take him if he did liberal arts, but he refused.

Instead, he joined the Veterinary Department in Nyeri as an untrained junior animal husbandry assistant. Although he loved veterinary work, he resigned by the end of the year and joined the post office; he had heard a false rumor that his brother was going to be made district veterinary officer for Nyeri, and he felt that he could not work under him.

Kenya was then freshly independent, and the country was alive with competing foreign study opportunities, for which Mbogo began to interview. He did not want to go to Britain or the United States, "because they were our colonizers." He was offered a scholarship to Israel in agricultural engineering but declined it because he would have had to pay for the plane ticket himself and thought it was too expensive. Then he was offered a chance to go to Bulgaria in forestry, which he accepted, although he had no interest in the subject.

He arrived in Bulgaria in October 1964 and immediately and without difficulty changed to veterinary medicine. He spent the first year at the Institute of Foreign Students, where they were grouped according to their area of academic interest and taught Bulgarian, with emphasis on the appropriate vocabulary. Bulgarian girls were assigned to help teach them, which Mbogo took as a sign that the Bulgarians were not trying to keep their women from the African students. In that first year he and a friend volunteered to go to a harvest work camp in the north of the country. The Bulgarian volunteers were billeted with families, but the two foreigners were given a special room, which they took to be discrimination. Then an old man invited them to dinner. In the course of the evening it became evident that he thought that they had refused to stay with Bulgarian families. When he found that they had not been invited, he asked them to stay with him, which they did. Every holiday after that

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they went to stay with old Nicholai in Kuruchavene, near the Danube. They knew where the key to the house was kept, and Mbogo regarded Nicholai as a father to him.

Mbogo then went to the Higher Institute of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Sophia, from which he graduated in December 1970, second in his group of twenty-five. He had nothing but praise for the faculty, whom he found always ready to help the foreigners with free extra lessons.

I experienced no racism in Bulgaria. I traveled over the whole country, missing only one town. What people called racism there was due to ignorance, not racism, for an ordinary Bulgarian knows little of Africa. When people found I spoke Bulgarian they would be very friendly, take me to their houses, even get me somewhere to sleep with people who I had never seen before. There were some problems in big towns [but that is true of big towns everywhere.] There was no problem dating Bulgarian girls. Of course [one sometimes had] conflict with another man over a girl [as is normal]. . . . If I went into a bar to buy a drink, after a while someone would come over to see if I spoke Bulgarian. I never had to buy more than my first drink. . . . [In homes] we would drink wine out of a common jar and eat off the same plate, as was the Bulgarian custom.
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Mbogo returned from this positive experience in Bulgaria to find difficulty in getting Kenya to accept his degree. Many of the early students who had gone to Eastern Europe had had very weak academic back-grounds, and this discredited the credentials of those who came later. Fortunately Muriithi, who was by then director of veterinary services, had passed through Sophia while Mbogo was there, had visited the Higher Institute, and had received thorough reports on the quality of the Kenyans who were in the program, which should have been enough to justify Mbogo's employment. Nonetheless, Muriithi would not have even the slightest suspicion that he was doing something special for his brother. A procedure for validating all their credentials was established. Those who had non-Commonwealth degrees were sent to the diagnosis section to be observed.

I was taken to Geoff Holm, who was the trouble. He looked very unfriendly. He showed me an office with a microscope and he [and] his technologist, Ashford . . . [gave] me twenty-six slides to analyze. Then they marked them and I still don't know what I got. After three [more] days someone [finally] came and showed me where I could get some coffee. I finally discovered three other men who were in the same state as I [was] and I went and joined them in their office. We were not given specific duties. We drafted diagnostic reports for Holm to sign. Every time I went to Holm for a question he gave me a book, until I had nine. Then I read them, took them back, gave him one in Bulgarian, and told him to read it.
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Ashford would refuse to go and get samples and would make us go and get them, although he was but a technologist. One day I went and brought the whole offal and put it on a tray on his desk.
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After a year of this guerrilla war, Mbogo was licensed by the Kenya Veterinary Board for work with the government and received a regular post with the Central Artificial Insemination Station.

Those who attended non-English universities had a much harder time gaining acceptance from the British on their return to Kenya. Eastern European degrees were at the bottom of the pecking order, followed by those from India and then America.

Harris Mutio Mule​

The boy who would eventually be known as Harris Mule, the planner, was born on December 7, 1936, in Mbooni Location, Machakos District. He was the second son of Ruth Katuku and Philip Mule, the third of the nine children they would eventually have. Ruth Katuku gave birth at home under the care of a traditional midwife, as did everyone else at the time. The house was a "permanent" one, which only the elite could afford at that time but which are common in the highlands of Kenya today. (See plate 14.) Built by his father in 1930 and still standing today, it has several rooms, the walls are made of mud and wattle covered with a layer of cement, and the roof is galvanized iron, from which the family can collect drinking water and save the women the hard work of carrying it up from afar.

There was a small problem with the baby at the birth, and the midwife sent for the assistance of an American missionary, who came the short distance on foot with his wife. After taking care of the problem, he remarked that the baby "is a cock," that is, a boy and strong. (The cock is a traditional symbol of strength, which is why it later became the symbol of the Kenya African National Union, the party that brought the nation to independence.) At first Ruth Katuku called the baby Ngumbau, which means "strong." His sister, who was six at the time, remembers that he was strong enough to struggle out of her arms, so that she wasn't allowed to care for him. But there were three years between the boy's birth and that of his elder brother, and two years separated the births of the other children. So he also was named Mutio, which means "one who is delayed," and came to prefer that name.

At what was then the young age of seven, Mutio (Harris Mule) began his studies a mile away at the Mbooni African Inland Church School. The floor was dirt, six students sat to a desk, and writing was done with chalk on slates, but "in those days our school was the best." Mutio quickly

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identified with school and did well at it. As a lower-primary-school child, he would load up a washbasin with stones and push it around the yard, playing that it was a car. He said that when he came back from Makerere (the highest educational institution to which Africans could then aspire) he would have a big car and give the family gifts (which the stones represented). His progress, however, was not all smooth. He didn't do well in one of the sets of lower-primary-school exams, and the teachers were concerned, because they regarded him as very bright. Mutio told them that he was coming to school late because he had to look after the cattle for his father, which was a lie. When his parents were called in, he finally admitted that he did not like mathematics and so was playing on a swing in the bush each morning until the class in that subject was over. It came out that the problem was that he did not understand "carrying" in addition. His teacher told him that if he did not like math he would not have to do it and that he was to bring six of two types of fruit to school. The teacher then used the fruit to show him how to do the carrying. From then on Mutio liked math.

Philip Mule took a great deal of interest in his children's education; he would discuss them with their teachers, check their notebooks, and inquire after their class rank. He was also very much concerned that they learn the moral value of work, even when he was well enough off that the family had others working on the farm. Philip considered work a virtue and no task beneath him. He would even cook sometimes, which was "women's work," for he had worked as a cook early in his life. He expected the children to rise early in the morning, say their prayers, and put in a full day of effort, working up to eight or nine at night. They dug many of the bench terraces on the farm (which were used both to prevent erosion and to conserve water). The boys shared the responsibility for the cattle.

For seven years Mutio spent his school vacations helping to care for the family's some two hundred cattle across the Athi River in the Crown (public) Lands of Yatta. This was fifty miles away, and Mutio would have to walk two days through dry bush to get there. Once there, he would help his father's men tend the cattle, reassembling them when they were scattered by the lions, walking them ten miles each way for water each third day, sleeping with them in a kraal (corral) made of thorn branches, and eating a simple diet of ugali (maize porridge) and milk. In the midst of this period, at age eleven in 1947, Mutio was circumcised, although he never went through the traditional puberty rites, as the church opposed them. Later in his education Mutio graduated to running one of his father's shops.

Mutio went through five years at the local Mbooni AIC School, after which he took the Common Entrance Exam. He placed first in his school

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and earned a place in one of Machakos District's four intermediate schools. He was sent to Masii, where he had to board with another family because the school was fifteen miles from his home. At the end of Masii he took the Kenya African Primary Exam, again placed first, and earned a place at Government African School in Machakos, the only secondary school in the district.

He entered Form I at Machakos in 1950 when he was only thirteen, the youngest boy in his class. He was saved from the usual harassment that younger boys received from the upperclassmen, however, by his older brother's presence in an upper form. Mutio never was a prefect nor particularly active in sports in school, probably largely owing to his relative youth. But there may have been other reasons for his not being seen as "leadership material" by the headmaster—reasons that can be inferred from the following incident. At Machakos, Mutio was required to assume a "Christian" name—that is, a European one. Much to the annoyance of the very religious headmaster, Mutio chose the name Harris, a nonbiblical one. The choice was deliberate, for by this time the boy was in rebellion against the fundamentalist morality of the African Inland Church. He began smoking and drinking at age twelve and went through life without ever being baptized, a sacrament that the AIC administers only to adults.

At the end of Form II Harris Mule (as he has since been known) took the Kenyan African Preliminary Exam but did poorly in math and nature study and did not qualify for Form III. Fortunately for him, the school made an exception and let him continue. He made up for his near miss by scoring near the top of his class on the Kenya African Secondary School Exam at the end of Form IV.

In the normal order of things Harris should then have gone to Alliance High School, where he would have followed in the footsteps of Ishmael Muriithi and eastern Kenya's other Protestant elites. But these were not normal times. A State of Emergency had been declared in the colony because of the Mau Mau rebellion, and the British were anxious to prevent any alliance between the Kikuyu and the linguistically related ethnic groups that neighbored them. Thus the 1954 Form V class of Kamba boys was sent to Kakamega High School in western Kenya. There they were celebrated anomalies and were well treated in the area. After two years there Harris passed the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate Exam with a Division I and earned the right to go to a university.

Harris chose to go to the new Royal Technical College (now the University of Nairobi) rather than the more prestigious Makerere. He knew that if he went to Makerere he would be compelled to study English, geography, or history, as those were the subjects on which he had ex-

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celled on the Cambridge exam. These subjects would lead him into a career in education, and he did not like teaching. He wanted to study economics, "as it was associated with money," and since the Royal Technical College did not offer liberal arts degrees, he would be permitted to take it.

The Royal Technical College was an exciting place for Harris when he joined its first class of 200 in 1956. It was the first multiracial school in Kenya, with about 130 Africans, 60 Asians, and 3 Europeans. It also was a breath of freedom after the iron discipline of secondary boarding school; one could speak one's own mind and go to sleep and get up whenever one wanted. The facilities seemed very good to him: each person had a cubicle to himself, good food, and twenty shillings (about $3) pocket money a month. He also found the teachers to be very good. All were British except for one Indian and the Kikuyu Dr. Gikonyo Kiano (another later cabinet minister). The head of the Economics Department was William Rodgers, who took a very personal interest in his students. Rodgers thought that his students were brighter and better prepared than the educational authorities did. Despite having studied the same number of years as British students entering university, they were considered to be behind in their educational development and in need of another two years before taking their Advanced Level exam, the English university-entrance test. Rodgers encouraged half of his students (about 15) to try the London A Level exam at the end of the first year, and 7 of them passed. Harris Mule was among them.

Rodgers's success, however, was a mistake. The college was not yet ready to offer economics classes at the full university level, and the seven victors were left with no place to study. He managed to get places for two at Makerere, one in England, and two in the United States. Harris too was offered a place at Makerere, but he decided to wait out a year and to try to continue at the college.

So Harris Mule took a job and experienced what he says was the biggest adjustment he ever had to make. He held several jobs, as they were easy to come by with the qualifications he had. But the customary salary at the time for those who had passed the A Level was K.shs. 486 ($70) a month and the standard of living he had experienced at the college would have cost about K.shs. 1,000. The returns to education in east Africa are extremely high. One's salary increases by at least 50 percent for every two years of additional education. Because Harris had not finished his degree, he found himself on the labor market with income expectations one step higher than that which he had yet achieved.

As it was, the Royal College delayed the start of its degree program in economics still further. Harris thus applied for and got Fulbright and Smith Mundt Fellowships from the United States embassy and entered

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the University of Denver in September 1959. The people of his home area also contributed about $150 to his four-year stay. He entered the University of Denver as a sophomore and received his B.Sc. in economics in 1962. He went on to receive an M.A. in economics in 1963, supported by a University of Denver fellowship.

Mule was struck by the higher standard of living in the United States, the high wages, and the relatively low costs. He also experienced a substantial increase in his own income, for his Fulbright allowances were four times what his Kenyan wages had been. More fundamental, he reports, was the difference in freedom, especially freedom of expression and of association, for African nationalism was still a subversive ideology for the British Empire.

A different kind of freedom startled Mule during his very first weekend at Denver at a school-sponsored dance, itself a departure from what he would have expected of a Methodist college, given his upbringing in the fundamentalist AIC where dancing is forbidden. At the dance Mule found the college chaplain playing a clarinet in the band. Though he had broken with the church himself, Mule was scandalized to find the chaplain condoning dancing and confronted him afterward. He became quite close to the chaplain, the Reverend William Rhodes, and attended his optional chapel services faithfully. Rhodes recruited Mule as a teaching assistant for the required philosophy and religion course, for he knew the Bible thoroughly—although it took him a long time to get over his literalist interpretation of the scriptures. Mule also used to preach occasionally at the black Zionist Baptist Church, for he enjoyed the spontaneous, extemporaneous preaching style.

Mule's sole involvement in the American civil rights movement was attendance at a large student conference in Athens, Ohio, in December 1960, where Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke, and he heard talk of African independence. He was buoyed up by the student idealism of the time and was disappointed to find it missing at Harvard when he returned to the United States in 1966.

Although not a civil rights activist, Mule could not help being affected by the racial problems of the United States. He found the warmth and friendliness of midwestern Americans a pleasant contrast to the Kenyan British.

But those who were prejudiced were very nasty, for American prejudice was worse than colonial discrimination and oppression. As a small black minority in the United States you had to live with discrimination constantly, whereas in a colonial setup it is more intermittent. When I went to Texas with an American Indian, his white wife, his Indian cousin, a Mexican American, and an [African] Swazi, we had a good time in the Indian Reservation and in Albuquerque but in Farmington, Texas, we could not
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find a place to eat or drink. The people in the restaurant panicked at our coming; the women ran out. We had to go to the airport, where we demanded to be served [on the grounds that] it was under the Federal Aviation Administration and subject to federal regulations. It still took the intervention of some FBI agents for us to be fed.
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He was unintentionally the first black to get a haircut from the university barbershop at Denver. He was in the process of being refused service when the chaplain came by and forced them to cut his hair. Unfortunately (he reported), they did a very bad job!

There were a few other blacks at Denver, both American and African, and Mule was close to them. Among them was Francis Mashakalia, who later followed Mule up the hierarchy of Kenyan Planning. The Africans around the state of Colorado got together for a party in 1961 to honor Ghana's independence. Afterward, at 2:00 A.M., they drove some of the celebrants back to Boulder and stopped at a coin-operated pump to buy some gas. Unbeknownst to them, it had been burgled by some black Americans earlier, and they were followed and arrested when they got to Boulder. It was 6:00 A.M. before the error was discovered and they were released. Enraged, they went and woke up the mayor of Boulder to protest, waving their Fulbright cards, which asked for respect and help. The worried mayor gave them breakfast and wrote a letter of apology to the university.

The Economics Department at the University of Denver had only four faculty and was not as quantitatively oriented as most modern American departments. Mule was most influenced by John Foster, an institutional economist from whom he took four courses. Mule's quantitative skills came instead from his minor in statistics. Because of his friendship with a mathematics professor, he served two years as a teaching assistant in the introductory mathematics course and learned the basics of the subject through the grinding work of grading it. Looking at his transcript from these years, one would not necessarily guess that he would later become such an accomplished economic policymaker. Although he did well in most of his economics classes, his grades in the quantitative courses ranged in the Bs and Cs. Looking back at that transcript, Mule and some of the American economists who knew his later accomplishments concluded that perhaps institutional rather than mathematical economics is a better preparation for policy-making. The focus on quantification in economics makes one into a technician, letting one forget that production takes place in a cultural and institutional context.

Mule returned to Kenya in June 1963 and was offered positions as a labor officer or a district officer, the latter being the same job then held by Nyachae. He declined, for he had always wanted to be a government economist. Instead he took a post as a statistician in the Ministry of Ag-

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riculture and from there became a planning officer in 1965. His upward mobility would have been more rapid if he had become a district officer, but he had pursued an interest in economics for a long time and wanted to continue with it.

After he had worked for the Government of Kenya for a few years Mule returned to the United States in 1966–67 to attend Harvard University as a Mason Fellow. He was disappointed. He found Harvard students rich, self-centered, and cynical, unlike the warm, idealistic youth he had known in Denver. The economics disappointed him as well. He studied with several economists of note, but most of them left him cold. They made the subject dry and technical and robbed it of its institutional richness. Only the young radical economist Samuel Bowles impressed him, both for his careful, objective professionalism in the classroom and for his extracurricular commitment to redistributive policies. Mule's performance struck most of his professors as indifferent too; his grades were all in the B range, something that some of them found ironic later on when his performance as a policymaker so impressed them.

Harris Mule's educational career, then, showed an early and consistent focus on economics. Although not a brilliant quantitative technician, he mastered the principles needed for effective policy-making. He rebelled at the formal aspects of the religion that surrounded his upbringing, but he seems to have been profoundly affected by its deeper values.

Conclusions​

The educational pyramid these men climbed was extremely steep, littered with examinations and small rates of promotion to the next level. Those who went all the way through it, as did Karanja, Mule, and Muriithi, were the leaders of a genuine meritocracy. Those such as Mbogo and Nyachae who did not go quite so far through the regular Kenyan system were nonetheless still members of a relatively small educated company. They were innocent of the degree to which their parents' relative wealth and education had advantaged them in this upward struggle. The fact that so many of their siblings did relatively well too indicates that more than just brains and chance were at work. They were correct, though, in believing that they could not have gotten as far as they did without intelligence and hard work. They had won against a colonial educational system in which the odds were heavily stacked against them, giving all of Africa's educated elites a great sense of self-confidence and the right to lead.

Karanja, Mule, Muriithi, Mbogo, and, to a lesser extent, Nyachae all emerged from the colonial period with educations that left them deeply

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committed professionals. Nyachae fought an administrative career while he was in school, and his allegiance to administration therefore emerged more from his experience than from his training. This made his conception of his professional role distinctly Kenyan and not international. Only Muriithi, by having been in the top of his class at Edinburgh, can be said to have had a distinguished background in his field. But the training that all of them received was solid, thorough, and practical, the type of instruction that often sinks in deeper and has a more profound effect on values than a more theoretical education does.

All five men reviewed here studied overseas, though the time involved was much less for Karanja and Nyachae. A relationship appears to exist between the length of time abroad and the degree of identification with their professions that these men showed in their later lives. But the correlation is probably spurious. Karanja was dedicated to his work in a way that was equivalent to professionalism. If he did not spend his whole career in engineering, it was largely because his qualification was seen as second-class in Kenya. His work as a manager clearly reflected an engineer's approach. Other Kenyans also spent time in foreign universities without developing the same kind of professional commitment that these men showed. The truth is that the professional nature of the education was probably more important than its place, the foreign exposure counting most in the extent to which these men looked to international peers for their professional standards.

The strong values these men held about their administrative roles appear to have come from several, rather subtle sources. Much of the explicit value socialization to which they were exposed they rejected. In terms of Stinchcombe's four conditions for institutional continuity,[16] the British did control the conditions for socialization into elite positions and initially were able to select their administrative (but not their political) successors. But independence meant that they were not able to determine their subsequent advancement, and even under colonialism racism prevented them from being "heroes" on whom Africans would pattern their careers, undermining some of the effectiveness of the value education they controlled. Too much of it was provided by whites, who, even when well meaning, were socially foreign and irrelevant as role models. For example, Mule, Muriithi, and Nyachae also were raised in strongly Christian homes but were quite lax about their involvement in the church as adults; Mule rebelled strongly against his religious upbringing and refused to be baptized. At the surface level this socialization did not "take"; at a deeper level it appears to have shaped their more fundamental moral values about charity, honesty, integrity, and so forth. One of Mule's sisters, who became a Catholic nun, felt that despite his rebellion Harris's personal moral standards were the most deeply

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religious of all the siblings. Both Harris Mule's and Ishmael Muriithi's fathers had found success out of commitment to these values, and their example clearly shaped their sons.

Similarly, the strong values of public service that were taught at Alliance High School did not take as well as they did in the English public schools. But they had an effect nonetheless. In order to affirm their own distinct, personal identities, these men rejected the form of much of what they were taught but (perhaps subconsciously) kept its substance. Their routes to the top had been through institutions where these values were imparted, and they could not both proclaim their merit for having succeeded in them and completely reject all that they stood for.

Some of the effective socialization the British provided they did not fully intend. An orientation to law and order, authoritarianism, and the use of public office for personal benefit were all embodied in the institution of the African chief, which the British created. The first two values were also central components of the relationships that European administrators had with Africans throughout the colonial period. Strong role expectations were thereby created. These were sustained despite the postindependence efforts of donor experts in development administration to change them, both because they were deeply ingrained and because they served the political needs of the new, insecure African government.

Subtle value socialization was embodied in the professional education these men received as well. These values were rarely taught explicitly, and they probably would have been rejected if they had been. Instead, they were premises that were shared by the international community of professionals with whom these men came to identify and were assumptions that underlay the technical problems these men were trained to solve. Thus civil engineers are trained to maximize the quality of their product while seeking efficiency in their use of labor and materials. They also tend to think of labor as an adjunct of machines, thus subverting a human relations approach to management. All these values will be evident in the later work of Charles Karanja, the tea manager. Economics is premised on the primacy of the public interest and trains its practitioners to maximize it. in the form of Gross National Product, at the expense of special interests. We will see that Harris Mule, the planner, gave national economic interests priority over sectional ones and saw his distributive concerns in terms of "equity," an attribute of the national economy. Veterinary medicine gives great importance to disease prevention, which is a collective good, and thereby stresses the quality and integrity of disease reporting and quarantines. Ishmael Muriithi will find himself at odds with his political superiors over these issues. A profession is defined both by the technical skills it embodies and

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by the standards it expects of its members. Both techniques and standards are grounded in values—assumptions about the kinds of problems it is important to solve and the ethics that should be observed in doing so. When one is trained into and identifies with an international community of professionals, one is adopting a strong implicit set of values.

Superficially, this chapter has described educational experiences similar to those of virtually everyone reading it. On a deeper, more profound level, however, the experience discussed here concerns the struggle for national independence and racial dignity. Most of the East Africans described here understood that their upward mobility through the education system was not just a matter of their own personal advancement; essentially it was also a contest to prove that Africans were as capable as Europeans and could and would replace them. Almost all of them reported having to deal with incidents of explicit racial discrimination, including many they encountered during their studies abroad. This dimension of their education gave them a special energy and excitement in the long struggle against a system that was heavily stacked against their achieving success. They were truly growing up and out of colonialism.

They had received more than a formal education in the process: they had become part of an informal network of old schoolmates who were also in the meritocracy and who would govern Kenya. The schools through which they had passed had also socialized them to hard work, discipline, and authoritarian leadership. These values influenced their subsequent administrative styles.



image

[Full Size]


1.
The civil service core of Kenya's economic decision making in 1986: (from left)
Harris Mule, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Finance; John W. Githuku,
Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Planning and National Development;
Simeon Nyachae, Chief Secretary; and Philip Ndegwa, Governor of the Central
Bank of Kenya. By permission of The Daily Nation (
 
Torque vs HP said:
Ofisini kwetu tuliwahi kua boss beberu baada ya kuongoza kwa miaka 7 akasepa tukaletewa boss wa rangi yetu aisee pale ofisini ndani ya miaka 2 walibaki amatuers tu wengine wote tulitafuta machaka mengine maana sio kwa level ya unprofessionalism iliyokua inaendelea ofisini,poor ethics&morals etc

Source : University of California Press African Successes

Chapter Eleven—
The Unofficial Lives
The behavior of most African public servants cannot be understood if we confine our observations to the office place. The demands of private life have an especially profound effect on the official actions of African administrators.[1] Of course the informal has a significant effect on the way formal roles are performed in American organizations too, as we have known for over half a century.[2] But the ideal of the separation of personal and job roles is very strong in the West, and it is possible to describe official actions there without referring to administrators' private obligations. Africa simply does not permit such a narrow, focused view. Kinship duties frequently impinge on work roles, and unless we understand how our four administrators handled the unofficial demands on their lives, we will not unlock some of the most important secrets to their official successes.



To appreciate fully the behavior of the four men we have been studying we have to put it in the context of what was going on around them. The stereotype of African bureaucrats would be something like the following: They are overwhelmingly concerned with the welfare of their family and ethnic brothers and sisters. Considerations of the broader public or national interest have distinctly lower priority for them. They have private businesses on the side, and these occupy a good deal of their attention during official working hours. The story is told of the official who has two jackets so he can hang one over his office chair and then leave for most of the day to handle his business. More commonly, they come to the office late, leave early, and are slow to answer messages. What does motivate these bureaucrats in their official duties is the prospect of personal gain. Contracts routinely require a 10 percent kickback to the responsible official. Vital permits are more easily and quickly ob-



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tained through the payment of a bribe. Much of this income will be used to support relatives and community projects at home. Officials may hope to become popular enough in this way to run for Parliament someday. Outside the bureaucrats' offices will be knots of petitioners from their home areas, hoping to use their influence to secure government jobs. As a result of this patronage, the ministry's offices and halls will be filled with junior staff who have little to do and whose conversation interferes with the work of those who are needed. Patronage leads to much incompetence in the public service, and there seems to be little ability to get rid of it. This stereotype is precisely that—an exaggeration. But it does have its grounding in reality. Only a minority of civil servants fit all the parts of this stereotype, but the behavior of a large number conforms to at least one of its components. John Montgomery comments in his study of managerial behavior in southern Africa that this "personalistic interpretation . . . is perhaps oversimplified [and the corruption part of it exaggerated], but [it] turns out to be a recognizable explanation of observed realities."[3] Jon Moris, using his Tanzanian experience, would agree.[4] David Gould, writing about Zaire, Nigeria, and Ghana, would even reject the qualification about corruption.[5]



Workaholics
As we seek to differentiate the four administrators from the stereotypical African bureaucrat, let us begin, as we would with a manager anywhere in the world, by asking how they handled the pressures of their jobs. All four men held extraordinarily demanding positions and reveled in their work. Ishmael Muriithi spent so much time traveling, both internationally and domestically, that his wife "used to joke, 'You only come here [in] passing.'" When Simeon Nyachae was chief secretary, each day he got up at 5:00 A.M., arrived at the office by 7:00, had a meal sent in so he could work through the lunch hour, and did not leave the office until 7:00 P.M. Harris Mule needed only four hours of sleep and frequently did professional reading until two in the morning. He often did not leave the office until 8:00 P.M. Charles Karanja was infamous with his family for his inability to sit still and his need to be always at some kind of work. All four men had the stamina to put in more hours on the job than most of their colleagues and the powers of concentration to make that time highly productive.



For relaxation Ishmael Muriithi was an avid tennis player until late in his career. When Simeon Nyachae was a provincial commissioner he used to walk regularly; as chief secretary he had a squash court installed at his home and would play by himself and do exercises every night, retiring regularly by 10:30 P.M. His entire life was run with a military-



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like discipline. Harris Mule was able to turn off the pressures of work quickly and relax into conversation. He used to enjoy going to bars with his friends when he was a young man—the usual relaxation for Kenyan men. But as his responsibilities increased he reduced his alcohol consumption and no longer frequented bars. He often spent the evening talking with a couple of very close friends instead, usually in a room at the back of his sister's Nairobi shop. None of the four administrators used alcohol to relax. Charles Karanja's drinking was very modest. Nyachae abstained completely and would not even take coffee, remnants of his Seventh-Day Adventist upbringing.



Sons of Their Villages
The character of risk in the agricultural systems of preindustrial society causes small producers to invest heavily in personal relationships as a hedge against adversity. Not only do close ties with social equals, such as relatives and neighbors, provide help when one experiences calamities such as drought or illness; bonds to one's social or economic superiors can also result in personalized assistance. For these latter, unequal types of relationships, the recipient promises support in return for the help that he or she receives. This social dynamic lies at the root of the patron-client relationships that pervade preindustrial societies and dominate most of their political processes.[6]



Men such as Karanja, Mule, Muriithi, and Nyachae were valued "sons" of their villages. Their upward mobility gave them access to resources that could make a large difference to the life-chances of their parents' neighbors and kin, most of whom were relatively poor. Their communities would not let them go. Relatives and neighbors gave these "sons" great status, insisted that they still belonged to the village (no matter how long they had lived away from it), and did everything possible to help them protect their positions. One senior official told me: "Once you reach that level, there will be so many people from your home and tribe helping you. They will not want to see that position of influence lost to them, so they will inform you and warn you of what they hear, even coming to your house at night." In return the villagers expect contributions to community projects, assistance with jobs, help with school fees, and emergency aid. If unchecked, these expectations can suffocate the financial well-being even of the well-to-do. How did this book's four "sons" manage these village ties?



The first expectation of adult males is that they build houses in the communities of their birth to reaffirm their membership, even if they are living elsewhere. Furthermore, for those in senior positions, these houses have to be "modern" and substantial—houses that reflect their



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status and to which they might plausibly retire someday. Three of the four men accepted this obligation; only Mule did not.



For Nyachae the decision was straightforward; two of his wives continued to live in Kisii after he left, and he needed housing for them. He provided it in a particularly impressive manner. The home consists of three large buildings, only one of which is used by his wives. On the spot that Chief Nyandusi had indicated his son should build, Nyachae constructed a round house of several rooms with a peaked roof. The design is striking and distinctly modern, but its shape evokes the filial piety and tradition out of which it was built. (See plate 26.) The home as a whole is impressive, enough so that President Moi has stayed in it when visiting Kisii. The buildings are a strong, visual statement that Nyachae's "home" is Kisii. (However, Nyachae lived most of the time in his large and extremely elegant Nairobi house.)



Charles Karanja built a house at his birthplace of Karatu in 1961. (See plate 27.) He was interrupting his career to go to Canada for further studies and needed a place for his wife and children while he was gone. He bought a farm in upper Kiambu in 1964, after his return, and lived there until 1974, a considerable distance from Karatu. He then bought a coffee estate in the same administrative division as his birthplace and built a very large house there, where he now lives. (See plate 28.)



Ishmael Muriithi built a house near Nyeri town on land given to him by his father. He rented it out, however, and never used it himself. This action was sufficient to meet community expectations, but he never developed real ties to the property. Instead of his being buried there when he died, as would have been traditional, his grave was placed higher up in the Aberdares at his mother's house, where he was born. (See plate 12.) (Muriithi lived outside Nairobi in a modest stone house that had been built by the European from whom he bought his farm.)



Karanja, Muriithi, and Nyachae were able to make reasonable use of the houses that they built at home. But this should not obscure the fact that these houses also fulfilled the important symbolic purpose of affirming their community memberships. Many other Kenyan men build such houses without having any practical use for them, lending them to relatives or using them for vacations a few days a year. They are nothing but monuments to the strength of their communal ties.



Harris Mule was alone among the four in not building a house in his place of birth, although he bought a farm there and visited it at least once a month. He identified with the community and assisted it, but he did not see the practical purpose in constructing a house there—it was too far from Nairobi for commuting yet close enough so he could make day visits to it when he had business to conduct. In any case, his mother had a good house in which he could visit if necessary. He put his money



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into the purchase of a moderate home in Nairobi instead. People in Mbooni were troubled that he had not built there, and it was one of several things about Mule that the villagers could not understand.



Patronage
One of the basic forms of assistance that villagers expect from their well-placed "sons' is jobs. Outside the doors of the influential there frequently will be long lines of those seeking an "in" to employment. Most of these petitioners will be modestly educated, looking for entry-level jobs. But a few among them will be well credentialed and in pursuit of plum positions.



The administrators in charge of public entities in Kenya generally have complete discretion in hiring their most junior staff and

therefore have considerable scope for the exercise of influence there. If they have openings at this level, they can easily employ those who have direct or indirect claims on them and can trade appointments with other senior managers with the same authority. (Thus an administrator's own hiring may result in a reasonable ethnic mix and still be an instrument for favored employment for his kinsmen throughout the government.)



The weak controls on the exercise of patronage at the junior level creates great temptations for the expansion of this part of the public payroll. During the period in which President Moi was consolidating his presidency, the numbers of junior staff in the government may have doubled. For example, the National Cereals and Produce Board increased its employees from one thousand to three thousand in order to staff the new buying centers created for the 1980 season (when Nyachae was chairman). Many valuable patronage opportunities were thereby created in localities around the country,[7] although Nyachae emphasizes that "at no time, during the period I served as chairman of the Wheat Board of Kenya and the NCPB did I request the management to recruit any relative or friend from my home district or any other area."



Senior appointments, however, are strictly controlled. The Public Service Commission, a parastatal board of directors, or some other control body will be involved in employment and promotion decisions. As demonstrated in Appendix A and discussed in chapter 4, the processes at this level are much more difficult (although not impossible) to manipulate.



Favoritism in employment is an important and highly emotional issue in Kenya. When people obtain positions for which they are not best qualified, they may perform poorly or treat the jobs as sinecures and do little at all. Productivity will suffer as a result. Villagers are innocent of these consequences, however, and are unrelenting in the pressures they



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apply to their relatives and "sons" for help. Other employees are alert for signs of favoritism, are demoralized, and speak bitterly of "tribalism" when they see it, and warmly praise an administrator who resists it as being "a nationalist."



The four administrators clearly deviated from this norm of patronage, although to different degrees. Ishmael Muriithi handled the pressures for patronage in the manner of a proper Weberian bureaucrat, strictly distinguishing between his private and public roles. The career of Dan Mbogo was probably hindered rather than helped by having his brother as his director. Muriithi was anxious to avoid even the appearance of favoritism. He instructed his family members not to send him job applicants. "If there is work, let them apply" through the proper, regular channels. Conversations with those close to him at his birthplace of Ihithe did not reveal a single case in which he had helped a person find employment. Many of those questioned had difficulty understanding why a man who was generous in other respects should have failed to help in this way. One relative, referring to Muriithi's farm near Nairobi, speculated, "You know that person has stayed as if he is a Kiambu man and [maybe] that is where he has helped much." If those in Muriithi's home village didn't appreciate his probity on employment matters, his professional colleagues in the Ministry of Livestock Development did. They considered him a "true nationalist."



Charles Karanja's record in this area is intriguing. On the one hand, some of those working with him felt that his employment decisions sometimes involved favoritism. Karanja holds that "in order to enhance faith and confidence in government [among the large numbers of unemployed], I have always deemed it my duty to see job seekers and to help where possible. The process is straining and time-consuming in a busy office, and . . . I have only been able to help a small fraction." He stresses that those employed were qualified and that the "record shows that I helped all on the basis of first come first served." Still, those who had some personal ties to him, either by kinship, by hailing from his parents' village, or by having been at school with him, would have felt more able than others to approach him. When he helped these people, it was possible for others to interpret this as favoritism, even though the ethnic mix of his employees is reasonable. By and large, the positions involved were junior ones, either at the KTDA headquarters or on his own farms. (The latter were not what the petitioners usually had in mind, as such work is hard.) He did not control the hiring of senior staff, but if someone about whom he had favorable personal knowledge seemed qualified, he would try to put them on the short-list for a board interview.



On the other hand, Karanja insisted on excellence on the job. He



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himself did not see any bias in helping those who came to see him and would have abhorred it if he had.



I maintain that to obtain the best results . . . , one must hire the services of the best-qualified people and show no favor, as to do so will always discourage the other workers. . . . If appointments were made on the basis of favoritism rather than merit, efficiency and performance would have been seriously jeopardized.

Whatever favoritism he did exercise did not hurt the effectiveness of his organizations. He strongly believed that work standards should be high and that his personal obligations ended with giving someone a chance at a job and did not extend to keeping them there. When he did hire people with whom he had a personal link, he would hand them over to someone else to supervise and would urge that they be fired if they did not perform adequately. There is no doubt that he meant this. He let one of his own sons be dismissed from one of his businesses. With respect to senior positions, Karanja's help ended with getting someone to the job interview. Once there, they were on their own and strict merit criteria prevailed. Promotions too were governed by performance alone.



Patronage, in the sense of helping someone with whom one has personal ties, has a radically different meaning if it is tied to strict performance criteria. In some circumstances it may even be conducive to superior organizational performance, for not only are those doing the work good people with strong incentives, they also have distinct feelings of personal obligation to their superior that can lead them to perform beyond the formal requirements of their roles.[8] But Karanja's methods sometimes cost him the loyalty of those few who felt outside the net of his patronage. These people contributed to his troubles when his political problems erupted.



Simeon Nyachae was politically astute in his appointments. The nature of his positions gave him little direct control over junior staff hiring. Thus to the extent that people in his home district of Kisii talked about his assistance with jobs, the reference was generally to employment in his businesses, not in the government. During the years that Nyachae held the confidence of President Kenyatta, he learned to work well with Kikuyus. When he emerged on the stage of power in his own right, he maintained a preference for working with a multiethnic staff. His professional staff in the office of the chief secretary reflected a wider ethnic mix than that of his predecessors in the position. He regarded the civil service as too important to the nation for ethnic meddling. University students from Kisii sometimes criticized him for not helping the careers of fellow Gusii.



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Nyachae had a reputation for working his staff hard, getting rid of those who were lazy or untalented, and rapidly promoting those who served him well. Thus, though he did exercise patronage in the civil service, it was meritocratic. Those he helped were those who had been skilled at anticipating and meeting his wishes for action. Similarly, when he was angered with a decision, a career that he had previously accelerated could be suddenly stalled.



Nyachae was not above using patronage in its more classical form, but it appears that he restricted it to domains that he considered political and thus more appropriate. Several relatives and associates (including a former schoolteacher of his) received positions on parastatal boards through his influence. Not all of the beneficiaries of his patronage in this domain were Gusii, but certainly many were. These appointments were highly visible, and in some cases the qualifications of the recipients could be questioned. In this way he gained a reputation among the wider public as one who could take care of those close to him. However, these board positions had long been used in Kenya as political sinecures, and they had little practical effect on the operations of the parastatals they nominally oversaw. Nyachae appears to have distinguished areas in which he felt that traditional patronage would damage the performance of public organizations from those in which it would not and to have confined his favors to the latter. It is symptomatic of the difficulties of administration in Kenya that the general public and some civil servants could not appreciate the distinction.



Harris Mule also seems to have made fine but principled distinctions about patronage. There was not even a hint of favoritism in his appointment and promotion of professionals. In a wide range of interviews with Mule's colleagues, some of whom were very critical about certain aspects of his handling of personnel, no one ever suggested that he was anything other than scrupulously fair. Such was his reputation for being above ethnic and family considerations that one senior official remarked, "I would be surprised if he helps people [from his home] with work, for I have never seen a job seeker in his office."



The view in Mbooni, from which he hailed, was quite different. There many people remarked on the aid he had given people in finding employment, sometimes citing specific cases they knew well. It was known that he did not like to see job seekers at his office, but villagers found him sympathetic when they approached him in Mbooni. Much of the help that he gave was simply the advice that the well informed can provide to the uninitiated, steering them toward the places where people with their qualifications are most likely to find success. Instances were also reported in which he had taken a petitioner's qualifications



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and called the person when he had found an appropriate spot. It appears that these positions were never in Mule's ministry.



Evidently Mule succeeded in a remarkable balance. His open personality and genuine desire to help people convinced supplicants in Mbooni that he was doing everything he could for them. At the same time he was keeping this assistance sufficiently far removed from his office that his fellow professionals saw him as a model of integrity.



Harambee, Patronage, and Politics
Kenya has a distinctively strong tradition of community self-help.[9] Rooted in customs of mutual assistance and communal labor, self-help began very modestly in the colonial period as a means of raising the resources needed for school classrooms beyond those that the missions and the government would provide. After independence self-help was raised to the level of an ideology. President Kenyatta dubbed it harambee (Swahili for "let's pull together") and exhorted communities to help themselves first if they expected government assistance and challenged politicians to demonstrate their value to their constituencies by mobilizing such efforts.[10]



Gradually harambee shifted from a vehicle for self-help to one for patronage. When it began and in the early years after independence, the sums raised were modest and comprised large numbers of small contributions. Often a measure of coercion was applied by the local chief and subchief to get these "gifts," but they did come primarily from those living in the community itself. As the matajiri class emerged, however, many harambee functions took on a distinctly different cast. Rural residents were transformed from the prime actors into appreciative audiences as their leading "sons" vied with one another to show who were the most generous patrons and to claim the prominence that followed. Peasant contributions may have been as great as before, but their significance as a percentage of the whole declined dramatically.



Ishmael Muriithi's role in this heady competition was an unpretentious one, as befitted his modesty and lack of claim on community leadership. In the first decade after he became director of Veterinary Services, Muriithi made the expected K.shs. 100 to 200 ($11 to $22) contributions to school projects in his home area and was visible only on livestock harambees. Grade dairy cattle need to be dipped regularly in acaricide to protect them from tick-borne disease. The Ministry of Agriculture was encouraging smallholders to form community groups to build and maintain cattle dips, and some donor funds were available to match locally raised money. Muriithi personally promoted this endeavor in the areas around his home in the early 1970s. Then, when asked, he



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would come in person to add his resources to the fund-raising effort. For the dip at Hubuini, near his birthplace in Ihithe, he matched the K.shs. 7,000 ($1,000) raised locally with an equal amount of donor funds that he controlled as director. On occasions like this, he himself would donate about K.shs. 1,000 ($111 at the time), some of which he would have collected from others in his office in Nairobi. A few times he served as guest of honor for these harambees, and he would then bring K.shs. 5,000 to 10,000 from himself and his associates in the capital. When Muriithi participated in opening these cattle dips he would donate a five-gallon can or two of acaracide, which probably had been given to him by the suppliers. There were approximately thirteen dips around his birthplace that he supported in these various ways.



In 1976 Muriithi raised his harambee standing in Ihithe. He was invited to a fund-raising event for a new Presbyterian church at Hubuini. Isaiah Mathenge, his friend and a former provincial commissioner, was the guest of honor and brought K.shs. 12,000. Muriithi surprised everyone by presenting K.shs. 18,000 ($2,570). The total raised that day was K.shs. 54,000, with the two patrons responsible for over half. Had both men had political ambitions, Muriithi's upstaging of the guest of honor would have represented a serious challenge. As it was, it seemed to cause no rancor.



Muriithi became known as a special patron of the churches in his home. He traveled too much to attend church regularly; very few of the matajiri do. But the Presbyterian Church of East Africa was central to the lives of Muriithi's parents, and he had a deep emotional tie to it.



In 1979 the Hubuini church was ready for the next step in its building program. A delegation went to visit Muriithi at his home in Nairobi, led by a church elder who had been to primary school with him. They asked Muriithi to be guest of honor for a harambee, and he promised to think about it. A month later he gave his consent and spent about five months on personal fund-raising endeavors in Nairobi. On the appointed day he brought two other prominent people from the area and K.shs. 14,000 ($2,000) of the K.shs. 44,000 raised that day.



Muriithi was asked to be guest of honor again in 1981, but this time after reflection he declined and recruited Mathenge to take his place. On this occasion, of the K.shs. 52,000 raised, Mathenge brought K.shs. 10,000 and Muriithi, K.shs. 4,000 ($400 by then). It is likely that Muriithi was careful not to upstage his friend this time and may even have redirected some Nairobi contributions to him. Over the years Muriithi donated K.shs. 36,000 to the Hubuini Presbyterian church, or about 18 percent of its completed cost. (See plate 29.)



The reputation Muriithi gained for his endeavors at Hubuini earned him an invitation to be guest of honor for a harambee for another Pres-



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byterian church at Kariguini in 1984. The place is about fifteen kilometers (ten miles) from Ihithe, but a cousin of Muriithi's who was an elder approached him twice on behalf of the church. Muriithi finally said that since this was a church of God he would come and help, but he did not have much money, as he had contributed to other harambees recently. Such protestations are common among guests of honor, who try to contain inflated rural expectations. It did not work. Muriithi brought K.shs. 31,000 ($3,100) and only K.shs. 3,000 more were raised locally. This was the epitome of "self-help" as a spectator event. Muriithi's efforts on behalf of this church had raised its stone edifice to the top of the walls before he died. The community was hopeful that the family might consider it a memorial to him and help to complete it.



During the last decade of his life, Muriithi probably contributed about K.shs. 100,000 to his community, about K.shs. 10,000 ($1,000) a year. Of course the large contributions that he brought were not only from himself but from his friends and associates as well. Since he would have been expected to reciprocate these gifts by his peers, our assessment of the final, net outlay would remain much the same. These annual sums were more than double the average family income of the villagers they benefited, but they seem feasible, if generous, for Muriithi's.



Harris Mule entered the world of harambee prominence in 1977. He was asked to be guest of honor for the Kiumi Water Project, which would bring piped water to farms in four sub-locations, including his own. The event raised K.shs. 30,000 ($4,300), of which about K.shs. 15,000 was brought by Mule from himself and his friends. Some large donors like to enhance their reputations by blurring the line between their own contributions and those of their associates and thus have their gift announced simply as coming from themselves "and friends." Mule is one of those who insists instead on enumerating the sources and amounts of the funds he has raised. At least as important as the immediate cash that Mule gave was the promise that he secured from Lois Richards of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide a matching contribution through CARE. This ultimately resulted in about K.shs. 100,000 in materials for the project. Many donor representatives were fond of Mule because of the ease with which they were able to talk with him and because of his reputation for personal integrity. He was the sort of government official they liked to help. USAID's promise had an amusing side effect. In announcing it, "I told the harambee that I would bring a woman who would match whatever they raised. The Kamba word for woman and wife is the same and the women [in Mbooni] thought she was my second wife. They mobbed her in excitement when she came [to make the presentation]." After another harambee this water project was ultimately taken over and com-



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pleted by the government's District Development Committee.



Mule used his contacts with donors to assist with two other small projects in his home. For the Kikima Farmers Cooperative Society he helped get Dutch funding for a community center, a dairy, and a revolving loan fund for the purchase of grade cattle. He also gave advice on how to get American assistance for over forty women's poultry-keeping groups in the location.



Philip Mule, Harris's father, had helped to build both a church at Tawa in 1938 when he was working there and the Mbooni Boys High School after independence. Philip served on the board of the school until he died in 1980, and Harris "inherited" his place on it. The school library is named after Philip. Harris was guest of honor at a harambee in 1979 at which the school raised K.shs. 102,000 ($14,500) in cash and materials. Harris was responsible for about K.shs. 70,000 ($10,000) of this sum, a large part of which were materials from CARE, which he had secured through the good offices of the Canadian embassy. He also found guests of honor for subsequent harambees for the school and obtained foundation scholarships for some of its poor students.



Harris Mule became chairman of the new Utangwa Secondary School in Mbooni Location in the mid-1970s. In 1985 he persuaded Chris Musau, a prosperous Kamba businessman near Machakos town, to be the guest of honor for its harambee. By the standards of smaller, struggling schools, this was a very successful event. It raised K.shs. 193,000 ($12,000) in cash and K.shs. 300,000 ($18,700) in materials. Musau brought contributions of K.shs. 56,000, and Mule, of K.shs. 40,000 ($2,500), both in cash. Mule's gift had been obtained from a British American Tobacco fund. Mule subsequently remarked: "I created a big problem for myself in bringing [such a large gift]. In self-help the more you do the more they expect. . . . In my next harambees they then were disappointed by my K.shs. 2,000 to 3,000."



The scale of Mule's personal gifts to various harambees was modest, for so was his personal wealth, and he was unwilling to sell favors at the Treasury for contributions. He was well liked for his assistance, however, because he knew how to tap into donor resources and had a generous, open spirit. The community's way of expressing this popularity was to insist that "he would get 95 percent if he were to stand for this seat in Parliament." It did not distinguish between the patronage roles that were appropriate for a politician and those for a civil servant.



Charles Karanja's involvement with harambees began in 1964. Their scale at that time was very modest. "We then might collect K.shs. 100 ($14) in a meeting. At one I offered to match anything they gave and they came up with K.shs. 371 ($53). I wouldn't dare do that today."



His earliest and enduring interest was in primary and secondary



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schools. In 1964 and 1968 he became chair of the boards of Mururia Secondary School, in Gatundu, and Kanunga High School, in Kiambaa. He was made board chairman of Loreto High School, Limuru (a Catholic girls school from which his wife had graduated), in 1969 and continued in that position through the end of the 1980s. For a time he served as the chair for the Loreto Teacher Training College in Kiambu as well. These schools are scattered widely in his home district.



Later Karanja added Catholic churches and some independent ones to his list of favored projects. In the area around his birthplace he was known to support "virtually every [church and school] project." (He himself would claim only "many.") But he did not accept involvement in harambees that concerned any sort of business. "It must be in the public interest." Similarly, although he obviously was dedicated to schooling, his sympathy with requests for the educational expenses of individuals was limited.



For the types of projects he favored he was exceedingly generous and active. Once established at the KTDA, he never gave less than K.shs. 1,000 ($143) personally to a project and averaged a couple of these a month. Most of the harambees he supported were within Central Province, and he would travel as far as Kirinyaga to attend one on a great many weekends. During his years at the KTDA he would be guest of honor at up to four harambees each year. After his retirement he accepted up to three a year. These would be mainly in his home division of Gatundu, with some others elsewhere in Kiambu District.



When Karanja was at the KTDA the highest contribution he brought to a harambee as guest of honor



was K.shs. 140,000 [$20,000], but then my personal contribution was less then than it is now. . . . I delivered more money then, for I would have my officers to collect money [for me]. Also business people give you more when you are in a position like that where they expect that you may be able to help them in return. Once I get K.shs. 20,000 to 40,000 [$1,250 to 2,500] I stop collecting now, although I gave K.shs. 60,000 [$3,750] last time. Normally you reach K.shs. 60,000 to 80,000. . . . I always ask those involved what the target is. I [have] never brought less than K.shs. 25,000 [$1,600].

I always read the names of friends who gave [contributions through] me. . . . The type of people I ask will almost always give K.shs. 1,000 [$63]. I rarely have to read [the names of] more than thirty people. . . . In recent years there has been a tendency for people to give publicly and not announce where the money is from. I don't like it when people say only "myself and friends." . . . You don't know where he got it from, nor whether he has given it all.

The particular harambee game in which Karanja was playing was one with high stakes. Many times he was giving more than his salary at the



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KTDA; this was possible only because the income from his businesses was always at least as great as that from the KTDA after 1969. Even at this level, the volume of giving and the newly amassed wealth in Kiambu were such that Karanja was considered to be only in the top two or three for generous contributors in his home place.



Simeon Nyachae began to play the role of guest of honor in harambees shortly after independence, as his meteoric rise to provincial commissioner gave him resources and influence with businessmen which relatively few possessed at the time. Much of this harambee activity was conducted in his official capacity and therefore benefited government-blessed projects in the areas in which he was working. Those in which he did participate in Kisii were close to his home and attracted little attention in the rest of the district. His contribution to one harambee, which he conducted at home in the 1960s, was big enough to make the then member of Parliament for his constituency, James Nyamweya, feel threatened by it. It seemed to him to be challenging his position as prime patron for the area and to portend a challenge by Nyachae for his seat. In fact Nyachae had no such ambitions, and it was two decades later before Nyachae expressed any interest in elective office. He seemed instead to be driven by a diffuse sense of responsibility for the welfare of the people his father had served.



Nyachae's pattern of harambee activity changed significantly after Kenyatta's death and his move to the Office of the President in Nairobi. He no longer had responsibilities for a particular province, and he did not have to worry about appearing to neglect the welfare of the Kikuyu he was governing for the benefit of his fellow Gusii. He continued to be a prominent and generous participant in harambees "in very many parts of Kenya, which shows the breadth of his friendships." Such spread earned him the praise of some as "a true nationalist." But his activities in Kisii also became more visible and eventually widened to cover much of the district. For example, in 1985 he was guest of honor for four harambees in different Kisii constituencies.



His harambees became very substantial affairs. For instance, the one that he conducted in the Majoge Bassi constituency in 1986 benefited 202 primary schools and raised K.shs. 6,000,000 ($378,000). Nyachae brought K.shs. 136,000 ($8,500) from himself and his friends and delivered a contribution of K.shs. 20,000 ($1,250) from President Moi. The M.P. from the constituency, Chris Obure, brought K.shs. 86,571 ($5,410).[11]



Nyachae's Political Downfall
Nyachae's efforts were widely known and appreciated in Kisii. At the same time they were seen as a bid for leadership: "He is trying to make



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his influence felt with the people." Once again, we see that citizens in Kenya do not distinguish between the roles that are appropriate for civil servants and for politicians. A small, rural shopkeeper in Kisii commented:



The difference between a cabinet minister and a chief secretary is that a chief secretary can give more in harambees. There is no other difference in the ways in which it is permissible for them to help.

But there are differences in the roles. A senior government official remarked of Nyachae:



It is not an asset as chief secretary to be so visibly political. . . . It is a powerful position with defined positions of chief adviser to the president, control of the civil service, [management of] security, etc. That in itself draws resentment, and if one is politically visible in addition, the resentment becomes too much. . . . I believe that in Nyachae's case he is not in harambee because of political ambition. He does it because he likes it. He likes to be appreciated; he likes applause. . . . [But it creates jealousy.] Politicians, including cabinet ministers, resent the fact that they can't extract as much, and they suspect that you are up to something. . . . I don't think any politician likes to see other politicians do better.

Indeed, Nyachae did involve himself in political matters in the 1980s. He was known to have supported Omanga's successful bid for Parliament in 1979 in his home constituency. But many civil servants have done as much. More seriously, he became deeply involved in KANU party politics at the Kisii District level. This district had always suffered from factionalism, and Nyachae sought to promote greater unity among its M.P.s so as to give them greater bargaining power at the national level. To this end he suggested in 1985 that the KANU branch chairman for Kisii not be a sitting M.P., and Lawrence Sagini, who had been Kisii's first M.P., was selected for the post. Many Gusii, however, did not interpret this as a neutral action on Nyachae's part. Sagini, a brother-in-law of Nyachae's, had been displaced from Parliament by Zachery Onyonka, who was then the sitting district KANU chair. Onyonka had been compromised with a murder charge arising out of the 1983 Parliamentary election campaign (although the courts ultimately found him innocent, placing the blame on one of his supporters). The scandal persuaded Nyachae that it would be wise to replace him. In acting on this conviction, he sealed a feud with Onyonka and made the other M.P.s uneasy that his influence might be eclipsing their own.



As long as Nyachae remained chief secretary and had the support of President Moi, his position was unassailable. After his retirement, however, he reversed his oft-repeated disinterest in elected office and declared himself a candidate for Parliament. Many former provincial com-



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missioners have attempted election in Kenya, but only one has ever succeeded. The frequently heavy-handed, authoritarian behavior that goes with the role of PC does not go over well at the polls. Nonetheless, informed observers not only considered Nyachae the favorite but gave him a good chance at carrying allies in surrounding constituencies to victory with him.[12] But he never got to try. Kenya is a one-party state; although elections are contested, candidates must be cleared by KANU in order to stand. Nyachae's "papers disappeared mysteriously at the KANU Headquarters," and his candidacy "did not therefore reach the executive committee for [the required] clearance." The president declined to intervene in this and thirteen other similar cases elsewhere.



How could such a powerful man fall so suddenly and so far? Onyonka's opposition to Nyachae was a foregone conclusion, and it is understandable that the other Kisii M.P.s may have been reluctant to yield primacy of place to him. Because Kenya is a one-party state, significant policy disputes cannot be resolved by elections, and highly personalized factionalism frequently takes their place. Nyachae himself attributed some of the antagonism to his attempts to get some of the M.P.s to account for harambee funds that were collected under their leadership and may have been misappropriated.[13] These are insufficient explanations. President Moi had the power to intervene on behalf of Nyachae's application to stand for election. Furthermore, Nyachae's businesses suddenly began to have severe difficulty getting the various government permits that they needed to operate; this trouble had to be coming from somewhere in Nairobi. Moi appeared to have turned his back on Nyachae for reasons that have never been made public.[14]



Although many details in Nyachae's "fall from grace" are not clear, some general observations can be made. His career had been built by always putting the interests of his president first. Although his loyalty to President Moi never shifted, he violated this principle in minor but important ways in his tenure as chief secretary. First, he was highly visible. This is standard for a provincial commissioner, who is representing the president in a purely local setting. But civil servants in the capital are expected to be invisible. The attention Nyachae was receiving in the press could have been seen as detracting from the stature of Moi and therefore would have been unacceptable.



Second, as chief secretary Nyachae was head of the civil service and of the cabinet secretariat. As such he felt obliged to represent the interests of the public service, to defend individual bureaucrats from unwarranted political attack, and to protect the integrity of basic governmental procedures. If this representative function were perceived to have conflicted with service to the president, it could have strained Moi's favor.



Third, Nyachae was outspoken and willing to take risks. These attri-



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butes first brought him to Kenyatta's attention and aided his advance to the post of chief secretary. But it is possible that they also led him to advocate some policies that finally tried the president's patience. Paradoxically, great careers cannot be built without taking risks, but in the end they can be undermined by such gambles as well.



Finally, a civil servant is not likely to be successful in the long run if he challenges elected politicians for their constituency support. Several times Nyachae in his role as provincial commissioner confronted members of Parliament, but he was seen as doing so on behalf of President Kenyatta. His activities in Kisii in the mid-1980s threatened to take him across a vague and invisible boundary and strained his effectiveness. After his retirement he attempted to convert the immense power he had exercised on behalf of the president into an elective political base. This is extremely difficult to do, for power that is delegated from the top is radically different from that which comes from popular support. The combination of an electoral base with high civil service experience in sensitive positions also can be threatening to senior politicians, who may find themselves suddenly challenged on their own ground. If Nyachae had succeeded in his campaign in Kisii, he would have dominated his district's politics in a way that no new Kenyan politician has been able to do since independence. In other words, he would have gone from being his president's "most obedient servant" to one of the powerful "peers of the realm." There were many who would have found that menacing.



Ill-Gotten Gains?
The wealth of men such as Karanja and Nyachae, and the substantial sums that are sometimes dispersed in Kenyan harambees, immediately raise the question of where this money is coming from. There can be little doubt that much of what is gained and given in the country has been corruptly obtained. It would be remarkable if it were otherwise. The political system is based on patronage. Citizens do not ask their elected leaders to deliver national policies; they ask instead for immediately tangible benefits delivered to themselves and their communities. This patronage is dispensed in the form of jobs, individual gifts, and harambee donations. Nor do voters inquire where the money necessary for this largess comes from; they ask only how much, not how.



Corruption has grown steadily in Kenya over the past twenty-five years. Although it still is not as pervasive as in West Africa, it is confronted in many aspects of public life. Rumors of 10 percent kickbacks on government contracts and purchases are frequently mentioned by usually well-informed people. Permits of various kinds also are said to be obtained often by bribes. The incentives for ill-gotten gains are pow-



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erful and the disincentives quite limited. The police find it difficult to keep up with all but a fraction of the corrupt activity, and the powerful most often are prosecuted only if they "fall from grace." In most of Africa the indictments for corruption come after one has lost office; they do not precede and cause the loss of power, as they do in some other political systems. In any case, the boundaries on the legitimate pursuit of private gain are poorly defined in Kenya. During the colonial period senior civil servants were allowed to possess farms of up to fifty acres, thereby encouraging their solidarity with the white settlers. With the Ndegwa Commission report of 1971 a public servant was permitted to own virtually any business or property. The doors to conflict of interest were opened wide.[15]



How do the four men conform to these values of public life? Remarkably, their behavior has generally been quite different from the prevailing standards. The next chapter will argue that this is part of the reason for their success as civil servants.



It is easiest to certify the ethics of Harris Mule, because his personal wealth was so clearly limited and what he gave away came largely from foundations and international donors. There is no unusual cash-flow to explain. The belief in his integrity was widespread and unanimous.



Considerable search revealed only one instance of what might remotely be called conflict of interest on Mule's part. He had used the Ministry of Agriculture's Farm Mechanization Unit to clear and plow his newly acquired farm in Kibwezi in 1984 and 1985. The unit was created to provide exactly these kinds of services to farmers like Mule, and he paid for the work. Nonetheless, he had argued against its highly subsidized services in the past and felt that they probably would not have gotten around to helping him if it were not for his position. He did nothing wrong, but he had gained a kind of advantage from his office. In any case, Mule did not continue to use the unit's tractors. Though the charges were low, the slowness of its work in 1985 substantially reduced his yields.



Mule's relatively simple life-style, selflessness, and humility were appreciated by people at his birthplace but were incomprehensible to them. One remarked, "This person eludes us." He did not play the role that they expected of a "big man." His failure to take better care of himself lay outside their system of values. The same behavior evoked similar admiration from his professional colleagues, but much better comprehension. They understood that it greatly enhanced his ability to perform his duties well and felt themselves challenged by it to greater integrity.



Harris Mule's generosity and integrity were inspired by his father, Philip, but they were also greatly aided by the simple tastes and support



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of his wife, Martha Ngina. Unlike many wives of the upwardly mobile, she does not press him for expensive things or urge him to make more money. "She is not demanding," a relative remarked. "I think he was just lucky in choosing her; I don't think he saw it clearly in her" when they met.



This does not mean that questionable decisions never came out of his office. Such unbending integrity would lead to one's being kept from the centers of decision in Kenya. Mule



gives his professional advice on what should be done but he has been willing to accept and implement political decisions when they are given to him. He has proved accommodating in that respect. But unlike others who have long accommodated . . . he has retained a professional vision of where he wants to see public policy go.

In other words, he has not been overtaken with cynicism and become self-serving.



Ishmael Muriithi's values on private gain from public office were similar to those of Mule, but his image with his colleagues was slightly tarnished in the later years of his career. He came to the civil service with the stern moral values of his Presbyterian parents. At the time of independence he was the district veterinary officer (DVO) in Eldoret. There were multiple chances for him to have undertaken some private practice on the side, and, indeed, many of the British DVOs had done so. However, Muriithi adhered rigidly to the formal regulations and kept strictly to his public practice.



The position of director of veterinary services, which Muriithi held for eighteen years, would have offered him a vast number of opportunities for corruption. The profits earned on the marginal costs of the chemicals and pharmaceuticals used in veterinary medicine are substantial. (Some of the biggest costs in this industry are for research and development, which have to be paid up front. Because the actual costs of manufacture represent a modest portion of the price charged for each unit sold, the incentives to sell additional units are very high.) Thus, bribes and other inducements to purchasing officers are common around the world. Confidential inquiries with well-placed people in Kenyan pharmaceutical businesses did not reveal even a rumor of corruption on Muriithi's part in dealing with them or their competitors. In fact, he even declined to accept for private use on his farm gifts of returned drugs that could no longer be sold.



Muriithi's standing was somewhat tarnished with his professional colleagues, however, over an episode that was perfectly legal in Kenya. When the Government of Kenya ceded the land outside Nairobi on which the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Disease



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(ILRAD) was built, a piece across the road from the site was unneeded. It was divided into three parcels, and Muriithi bought one of them. As Muriithi was instrumental in securing the site for ILRAD, and as he was subsequently on its board, he obviously had advance knowledge that the extra parcels were going to be sold and, in this sense, may have profited from his position. (There is no suggestion that he paid anything other than the standard price for the land.)



Later there were serious problems at ILRAD, and the board (including Muriithi) felt that it needed to remove several of the top managers. In the midst of this controversy one of those removed accused Muriithi's wife of having sold hay to ILRAD from this plot. As ILRAD is an international organization, it is considered unethical for board members to have financial dealings with it and thus create a possibility of conflict of interest. This charge was not pursued, Muriithi did not have an opportunity to reply to it, and some people doubt that it was genuine. Whatever the truth of the matter, the incident did make the purchase of the land parcel more widely known in the veterinary profession and compromised the reputation for absolute integrity that Muriithi had had with his colleagues. As the charges did not involve anything that is illegal in Kenya, they passed unnoticed by the general public. They may have been one factor, however, in Muriithi's subsequent decision to resign from the ILRAD board. This incident highlights once again the great gap that exists in Kenya between societal and professional ethical standards over conflicts of interest.



That Muriithi had high personal standards of integrity is not necessarily to say that the organizations he was associated with had the same. There is only so much that the man at the helm can do when he lacks the support of society and the state's monitoring institutions. Informal extra payments to veterinary field staff for their services had become frequent by the end of his career.[16] There also were many rumors of irregularities around the purchase of livestock at the Kenya Meat Commission, including during the years that he chaired its board.



Charles Karanja's fall from power at the KTDA was occasioned in part by his being caught in a relatively minor conflict of interest. He probably would not have made this error in the early 1970s. During that time he had substantial private interests in trucking but was careful not to do any business with the KTDA, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. However, the coincidence of President Kenyatta's declining health and acuity with the flush coffers of the coffee boom led to an explosion of questionable acquisitiveness among the political and administrative elites after 1976. Many were tempted into changing their ethical standards during this period; to a minor extent Karanja was drawn along with them.



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The Achilles heel in Karanja's ethical system was Africanization. He was passionate in his commitment to advancing African participation in the previously white and multinational bastions of the tea industry. Most often this involved extending the functions of the KTDA, but he was pleased to advance private Kenyan entrepreneurs as well. In domains where other Africans were offering their services to the KTDA, Karanja was scrupulous in not tendering his own, so as to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But in the areas where Africans were not represented, Karanja came to feel that it was legitimate for him to involve companies in which he had an interest of his own, so as to promote Africanization of the economy. It was in this way that the compromising decision was made to place trainee managers in the Ngorongo tea factory, in which he had an interest. He persuaded the KTDA board that this arrangement would speed the training of African managers for the KTDA factories.



There were other decisions that also might have been questioned. A company of Karanja's had indirect shareholdings in a newly created Kenyan tea brokerage firm that handled some of KTDA's business. Combrok provided good service at the same prices as other brokerages, so KTDA was not harmed in any way. Nonetheless, some eyebrows might have been raised if the Karanja-Combrok connection had been known.



Again to promote Africanization, a Karanja company acquired an interest in a Mombasa warehouse that was to handle some of KTDA's tea. When the major shareholder tried to charge a slightly higher price than his competitors were offering to the KTDA, its business had to be withdrawn to protect KTDA's interests and Karanja's reputation.



Most of those close to Karanja within the KTDA felt that "when he helped his business it was in ways that wouldn't hurt the KTDA." But this point and the nuances of his Africanization ethics were not apparent to all, and this cost him support both inside and outside the KTDA. It is certainly true that Karanja's use of his position for personal profit appears to have been legal and minor by Kenyan standards. His businesses flourished after his "fall from grace," whereas those businesses built on the use of influence usually do not, for their profits depend on favoritism. Even though Karanja's breach of integrity was minor, it damaged his ability to manage his organization aggressively and autonomously.



Simeon Nyachae was a man of great wealth and power. The combination created recurring suspicions that the former came from his abuse of the latter. From time to time members of Parliament, the press, and the rumor mills of Nairobi have all made allegations of corruption and conflict of interest against him.[17] Nyachae has effectively responded to many of the public accusations, and there is evidence that some of the



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other rumors were false.[18] But it is beyond the capacity of a single investigator, lacking legal powers, to establish the full truth in such a thicket of innuendo.



Still, we can suggest why rumors of wrongdoing would have arisen even if Nyachae may never have made a corrupt decision. First, he was a political inside player. He did not get to the pinnacle of the civil service by being a neutral technocrat. On behalf of his presidents he skillfully managed the interface between the political and the administrative. Payoffs and questionable business deals are a regular part of Kenyan political life, financing the patronage networks that are essential to political survival. As so much of Nyachae's work touched on sensitive political matters, people naturally would assume that he was privy to its shadier side as well.



Second, Nyachae was a wealthy man. When offices or parastatals with which he was associated made questionable decisions, people simply assumed that he had received a bribe. After all, reasoned the public, how else could he have gotten his money? Yet the decision could have been executed under political orders or because of a bribe to someone else. Nyachae's prosperity is easily explained by his business acumen, his early entry into the highly propitious climate for African business at independence, and his father's wealth. When similarly questionable decisions were made around Harris Mule, people simply assumed that he had not been involved. After all, he had nothing to show for it.



Third, Nyachae most likely did derive some business advantage from his government position without necessarily having sought it. He argued that since he consciously took himself out of the day-to-day running of his businesses and was ignorant of the specific points at which the government might help them, his interests could not affect the way he performed his public duties. He congratulated himself on having refused to bid on projects where he was conscious of a conflict of interest. Others were not so sure he had enjoyed no advantage.



Once you submit an application with his name on it as a director, no one would give it any problems. . . . He never had to get on the phone. . . . His name was enough. He's benefited by his position without having tried to.

The mere fact that he is associated with a business leads it to get government preference without his having to ask for it. Of course it becomes more difficult if you ask for help, which he does in the same way as a normal [citizen would]. You can only be at par if you discriminate against yourself, which he doesn't do.

That Nyachae had a quick temper and great influence over civil service careers led bureaucrats to err in favor of his interests without his even knowing it. That he had held powerful positions without interruption



― 242 ―

since independence could have left him unaware of how difficult it can be to get permits and contracts if one is not connected. Such advantages, even if they were unintended, created great resentment. This partly explains why many officials sought to block his business interests after his "fall from grace."



Even as chief secretary, Nyachae was conscious that something was not working with the government's conflict of interest regulations. He did not believe that civil servants should be kept out of business. The civil servants of the previous generation, like his father, Chief Nyandusi, not only had been permitted to have parallel business interests but had been actively encouraged to do so by the British colonial government. But Nyachae did wish that the irregularities could be controlled and the rumors quelled. His solution would have been



a standing committee of well-respected, honest, professional people who would deal with individual investments of people in public office [both elected and appointed]. One should be required to submit to them a report [each year] of all one has and account for every single cent one has invested. They should have a staff to analyze returns and investigate where investment has been very large. That would curtail abuse.

But he was unsuccessful in getting his proposal accepted.



Class and the Next Generation
Most people are concerned to provide not only for themselves but for the future of their children as well. The four subjects of this study had stood on the shoulders of their parents and joined the small percentage of the truly advantaged in Kenya. It would be unnatural if they did not want to help their children achieve a similarly privileged status. As we are about to see, they largely succeeded. Their offspring differ considerably in how well they are doing, but most of them belong in the same broad status group as their parents. In their occupations, friendships, and social orientations they are part of the matajiri (well-to-do), although not yet in terms of their independent wealth. The successful transmission of this group membership to the next generation is one of the clearer indications that class formation is well advanced in Kenya.



All of Charles Karanja's six children went to respected primary and secondary schools in the Nairobi area, and four of them received post—A-level training. Karanja was a strong family man and was usually home to eat with his wife and children each night. He also was a passionate believer in the importance of education and was strict in his insistence on study and good grades. His wife, Philomena, gave up her teaching career to manage their farms and raise the family. This was somewhat



― 243 ―

unusual. Most educated Kenyan women stay in paid employment, as they have servants to run their homes and as they are not required to participate in the social side of their husbands' careers. Philomena put strong pressure on the children to succeed as well. But the traditional formality and discipline of the African father-child relationship did not work well for Karanja in the new affluence in which his family was being raised. He was careful not to spoil his children with too-ready access to money, but as they got into their teenage years they could not attach the same importance to school grades that he did. "He sees your report [card] and tells you off for one hour. It made me feel rebellious. The more he pushed, the less we did. . . . You felt you could never do enough for him." In short, the social setting was more like the one in which American middle-class families find themselves. It was not at all like the one in which Karanja had grown up, where a lapse in effort consigned one to a lifetime of farm work.



At different points rebelliousness undid most of his children. Two sons made it to the University of Nairobi but failed because of alcohol-related problems. Two other children insisted on setting their sights below the university level. One son went to Canada to pursue his B.A. but dropped out after two years to become a lay preacher.



Despite these educational disappointments the children were launched on careers that seemed likely to keep most of them part of the matajiri, at least when they inherited their father's property. One daughter was married to a successful businessman. The other children all eventually joined his businesses in various capacities. Karanja was struggling with learning to delegate enough responsibility to them, and it seemed likely that they would become good enough to at least hold onto their father's gains. Despite Karanja's best efforts, none of his children were yet as successful as he was, but they hadn't dropped out of their father's newly formed class either. All of them had their own cars, and they were quite urban and matajiri in their social lives and orientations.



Harris and Martha Mule have two daughters, Nthenya ("early morning"), born in 1971, and Ndinda ("stayed for too long"), born in 1983. Nthenya was in an elite Catholic girls high school in Nairobi—Loreto Convent, Msongari—when the interviews for this study were conducted. (See plate 30.) Although she was bright, she was doing only moderately well in school at that point. She remarked that with regard to her studies her father was



"cool." You know he wants you to do well, but he never shouts at you when you don't. He says, "I see you had a problem. What was it?" He always goes to parents' days, et cetera. You can talk to him if you need to. Mother is the one who applies more pressure. She's always saying how well she did and how I'm not studying hard enough.

― 244 ―

Her parents were uncertain how to handle Nthenya in the atmosphere of relative affluence in which she was being educated. Harris was pessimistic about the ability of parents like himself to surmount their children's privileged environment. He remarked:



The children of the old chiefs have not done well. (Nyachae is an exception—and is only one of his father's hundred-odd children.) [The] same will happen to the children of today's rich. They don't do well in school and are poorly disciplined, poorly motivated workers.

Nonetheless, the Mules did succeed with Nthenya. Martha had given up her job as a secretary to raise the two daughters. They found the marginal income tax rates on her earnings too great to justify the sacrifice. They regularly took Nthenya with them to work on their farm, hoping to keep her grounded in Kenyan reality by so doing. She also was taught to cook and liked it. She passed her O-level exam in the First Division, did A-levels at Kenya High, and went to Grinnell College in the United States with a scholarship.



Although Ishmael and Martha Muriithi lived right outside Nairobi, their children had a different experience from that of most matajiri offspring. They were raised neither in a housing tract, as were the Mules, nor on a large estate, as were the Karanjas. Instead, they grew up working a small, family farm.



From the start it was manual labor—feeding chickens, milking the cows, grazing the cows before [the farm] was fenced, [helping] to clear the new land [with] father. . . . There is nothing [we] have not done. . . . [He taught us] "The more you do, the more you get."

All four children were sold on farm life and wanted to work their own someday.



The Muriithis went to Hospital Hill Primary School, one of the best of the government schools. The two eldest then boarded at Alliance High School, where their father had gone. They went on to the University of Nairobi, and Ann Wangeci became a dentist and Elijah Waicanguru a medical doctor. These educational institutions gave them a peer group of upwardly mobile rural youth, not the children of the affluent. (Grace had gone to England to take a degree in music, and Munene was in Jamhuri High School when this study was done.)



It seems likely that the environment was more responsible for the success of the four than was their father. He cared about and advised them, but he was away a great deal. "He'd come [home] after you were asleep or be gone before you were up. [You] never knew when he'd be there." To compensate, his wife Martha also quit her job and worked the farm full time. The rearing of the Muriithi offspring took place in a



― 245 ―

setting more like that of their father's than that of the other matajiri children.



Despite his large number of children,[*] Simeon Nyachae devoted considerable time to them. They obviously mean a great deal to him. "When he works hard he says he is doing it for the children." Even when he was chief secretary he would be home at 7:30 each night and spend an hour playing with the small children. He then would dine with his wife and the older children.



He had observed that children in polygamous marriages usually pull away from their father, identify with their mothers, and are factionalized accordingly. Nyachae was determined that this should not happen to his family, "so he raised us together to give everyone an equal opportunity." Once they were in secondary boarding schools, rather than separating to their mothers' homes, they would spend half their holidays working on their father's farm near Nakuru and the other half with their paternal grandmother on the Sotik farm.



[Nyachae] has always been a disciplinarian [with us children. The farm labor that we did] was for the purpose of making us realize that everything one got had to be worked for. . . . We probably did more work on average than other well-to-do kids.

The discipline was particularly strict around education.



At the end of each school term he would read the [grade] reports in detail in front of all of us and reprimand us where necessary. He followed progress in studies very keenly. He followed Charles's reports closely even when he was in Britain as a graduate student.

Despite his demanding schedule Nyachae visited their many schools for their parent conferences himself. He did have the traditional African formality in his relations with his offspring. "At the same time he made an effort to understand us as individuals" and tailored his careful advice accordingly.



Nyachae's wives devoted full time to the family's affairs. Although educated Kenyan women generally do subordinate their careers to their husbands', it is unusual for them to give them up altogether. The fact that the wives of all of the four men did so speaks to the great strain that the men's workaholic devotion to their senior positions put upon their families.



Most of Nyachae's children went to rural secondary schools, thereby having the same kind of upwardly mobile peer group as the Muriithis.



― 246 ―

Five of them subsequently went overseas to Britain, India, and the United States for university. None of them attended Kenyan universities. They entered professions such as nursing, hotel management, law, business management, and insurance sales. Nyachae was disappointed in the performance of only one of his children, and he was having him trained to enter one of his businesses.



Thus most of the progeny of these four men entered the matajiri class with their fathers. It seemed unlikely that many of them would achieve the same prominence or startling increase in wealth. Yet the new class had succeeded in reproducing itself. There were two important differences between this second generation and the first, however. The second did not have its parents' roots in rural villages. The friends of these young people were primarily like themselves—urban and from affluent families. This generation would not have the same ties of obligation to the peasantry as their fathers had. And very few of these children went into the civil service, unlike their fathers and grandfathers. This phenomenon is general among the offspring of senior civil servants. What had seemed to be the beginning of family dynasties in the public service (similar to those on the continent of Europe) was not to be.[19] It appears that the civil service is to be populated, not with a hereditary administrative elite, but with new waves of upwardly mobile rural refugees.



Conclusions
By virtue of their senior positions in the public service, all four men achieved incomes and standards of living far higher than those of their parents. They also came under incomparably greater financial pressures. Village neighbors and relatives wanted help with jobs. Expectations for harambee contributions were on an unending escalator. And they had to provide for the education and future of their children. They themselves had worked their way up through publicly supported institutions and had won their own positions through intelligence and hard work. However, their very affluence often sapped their children's will to work. The four men were forced to pay for expensive private schools and universities and to worry about businesses that their children could enter, so as to pass on membership in the matajiri class they themselves had struggled so hard to create.



These pressures were distracting in themselves and made opportunities for extra income very tempting. Many of those in their positions succumbed and became corrupted. By and large, the four men we are studying did not, meeting the financial strains through either modest living standards or business acumen instead. The extent of this self-



― 247 ―

denial was an important factor in determining the degree of their success. It gave them the respect and cooperation of their professional colleagues and made them less vulnerable to damaging accusations in the rough-and-tumble of bureaucratic politics.



The unofficial lives that we have reviewed here illustrate how Kenyan senior public servants become patrons to their communities and secure matajiri class membership for their children, whether their careers accomplish something for the public good or not. These breakthroughs were easier and more lucrative for the first generation of African public servants because new business opportunities were so numerous. The later generations would be jealous of their wealth and, finding it harder to achieve, be much more tempted to cut corners to get it.



The patronage role civil servants played gave them local political status and blurred the distinction between administrator and politician in the public's eyes. Civil servants who were tempted to play political roles often did so at the peril of their administrative careers. Visible participation in electoral politics by Simeon Nyachae and Charles Karanja ultimately cost both of them presidential favor. The power that a civil servant exercises in Kenya derives from the person of the president. Attempts to amass support from the grass roots, far from contributing to one's influence, will be seen as threatening to the president's power and probably lead to one's "fall from grace."



― 248 ―

Source : University of California Press
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jmushi1 said:
Kwetu ni kila kiongozi anaitwa either doctor au professor. Lakini hovyo kabisa. Hakuna la maana miaka nenda miaka rudi.
Click to expand...
Hakika!
Na hii ni kwa waafrika karibu wote.
Mwafrika ukitaka afanye vizuri mwekee ngozi nyeupe juu yake(hata kama ni mhindi/mchina) utashangaa atakavyokimbiza. Mf. NMB bank.

Ukimpa nafasi ya utawala/usimamizi, ataanza kuiba na uzembe kiasi cha kuharibu kabisa taasisi/kampuni.
Mifano ya aina hiyo iko mingi sana.
 
Behaviourist said:
Akili yako haina uwezo wa kujadili masuala kama haya. Haya masuala yapo nje ya upeo wako. Unaelewa kuwa dunia itakuwa katika better position zaidi kama tutaweza kuondoa ukabila, utaifa, ubara, na urangi moja kwa moja? Unaelewa kuwa kuna siku dunia haitakuwa na ukabila wala utaifa wala ubara wala urangi?
Click to expand...
Usitumie nguvu kubishana na mjinga bro.
 
Kwa Hilo kagame Yuko sawa
Mbona Sudan kusin Mamlaka ya mapato yupo MD mtanzania?

Hata hapa kwetu kuna mashirika yanaitaji expertise wa ulaya, South Africa
 
gambagumu said:
Kwa hiyo akili kwako ni kuwaona wanyarwanda hawatoshi, na yeye ndio mjaaa pekee
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Sie wataalamu wetu,hatuwapi nafasi,kipindi Tido Muhando,yupo TBC,alipambana kuiweka TBC katika kiwango Cha kimataifa kama BBC,lakini wapi wanaizaya wa ccm,wakampiga majungu akatolewa.
Swala la kuajiri wataalamu kutoka nje,linaumuhimu,wenzetu wanautaalamu kuriko sisi,vile vile,kwa kuweka sura zao,hata image ya nchi kwa wafadhiri inakuwa nzuri.
Miaka 60 ya uhuru hatuwezi kuzalisha mafuta ya kula,sukari,hizi si bangi?ni bora wizara apewe mgeni.
 
henry kilenga said:
Kwahiyo ufipa wakishinda ndiyo uchaguzi unakua huru .. Ila wengine wakishinda uchaguzi sio huru
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Wanapata wap nguvu ya kulalamikia uchaguz wa jamhur kuwa haupo huru na haujafata matakwa ya kikatiba ikiwa wao wenyewe mchakato wa ndani ya chama chao ili kupata wagombea haujafata katiba ya kwao ambayo wameiweka wao wenyewe.
 
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