Governors during the Biennial Devolution Conference at Eldoret Sports Club in Uasin Gishu County on August 17, 2023.
Being a governor, I have learned, is a lot like pursuing a PhD. The moment you think you’ve mastered a chapter, reality clears its throat, slides a new assignment across your desk, and waits. This is my final reflection on that journey, as requested by Prof Kivutha Kibwana.
There is surprisingly little mystery to winning a gubernatorial seat. Political scientists have long shown that the fundamentals of such races, whether for president or governor, are cast long before the first poster is printed or the first slogan shouted from a pickup. Prof Allan Lichtman’s “13 Keys to the White House” insists that by the midpoint of a term, the structural forces — economy, stability, scandals, party unity — have largely locked the outcome.
As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “There is a time for everything under the sun,” and apparently that includes the political weather. Lichtman has called every US presidential race correctly since 1981, except the Trump upset — proof that even oracles meet the occasional stubborn fact. In Kenya, the same rule holds.
A wise politician should feel the tide two years before the wave. After the 2021 letter, our own fundamentals had quietly set, like concrete that had already begun to cure.
Undergraduates learn knowledge
But winning is only the preface. The real book begins the morning after the swearing-in, when the music fades, and the county files arrive, heavy with dust and expectation. That is when the PhD truly starts. In academia, the gold standard is “Significant Original Contribution to Knowledge” — SOCK, though it is the only sock you can’t lend, lose, or wash. Undergraduates learn knowledge. Masters students master it.
PhDs must add to it. And to add, you must first read widely, map what is known, find the gaps, and stand humbly on the shoulders of those who came before. Newton put it best: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Proverbs is blunter: “In the multitude of counsel there is safety.” No one graduates alone.
Governorship is cut from the same cloth. There is no county headache today — youth joblessness, collapsing farm prices, underfunded Early Childhood Development Education, choked towns — that someone, somewhere, has not wrestled with before. Leadership becomes a discipline of reading, piloting, failing fast, adjusting, and scaling what works. If you ever meet a leader who claims he invented every idea from scratch, remember the African proverb: “A single bracelet does not jingle.”
Take automation in Murang’a. I owe that seed to Moses Kuria. During the Juja by-election, it was just the two of us helping George Koimburi. He introduced me to a team of JKUAT software developers — 20-somethings fuelled by ugali, ambition, and cheap Wi-Fi — who had built a polling app. It predicted results so precisely that party agents began side-eyeing their own calculators. We tested it in Kiambaa; it worked. We ran it in Murang’a; it worked again. On becoming governor, I hired the team to build in-house systems. County own-source revenue climbed from Sh500 million a year to what now looks like Sh1.6 billion this year. Proverbs 14:23 says, “All hard work brings a profit.” In our case, it also brought clean code and cleaner books.
The Murang’a Youth Service was borrowed from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave idle youth work, wages, and skills. We adapted it: community service, vocational training, NITA exams, and then startup capital. Sometimes leadership is holy plagiarism — copy what works, baptise it for local soil, and pray for rain. Paul wrote in Romans that “whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction.” Policies are no different.
Our school porridge programme for all ECDE learners grew from Parliament and from MPs already piloting it in Kiambu Town and Dagoretti South. A hungry child cannot do sums; even Elijah needed a meal before he outran Ahab’s chariot. A stomach has no respect for the syllabus, and no county child should battle mathematics on an empty belly.
Industrialisation came from reading about China’s rise under Deng Xiaoping after 1980, and Ethiopia’s sprint under Meles Zenawi. Books like The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier and How Asia Works by Joe Studwell hammer one truth: no country escapes poverty without manufacturing. That conviction became the Murang’a Industrial Park — a local answer to a global lesson. Good ideas, like rain, carry no passport.
Medical insurance card
The medical insurance card for poor households drew from Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government and the National Health Service. When the poor fall sick, the whole village coughs — socially, economically, spiritually. Scripture tells leaders to “defend the rights of the poor and needy.” In a modern county, that defence sometimes comes in the form of a biometric card.
Through all this, I have learned that being governor is a pilgrimage. You walk, read, listen, stumble, get up, negotiate, and pray — often in that order. You inherit problems you didn’t plant and plant solutions you may never harvest. As the old Kikuyu saying goes, the one who slashes the field does not always eat the harvest. Leadership is planting shade for strangers.
Which brings me to the question I now hear often: “Are you one-term or two-term?”
A fair question, and one I will answer soon. But after August 2027, it won’t be asked again. What will remain are the smart city roads, the automation systems, the renovated ECDEs, the dispensaries — whether we return or not.
So let me ask back: what matters more — that which lasts 16 months, or that which lasts for posterity? Who remembers Mwai Kibaki’s campaign slogans today? Yet Thika Road still carries us every morning. As Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy… but store up treasures in heaven.” In governance, posterity is our heaven.
In the end, true leadership is not written on parchment. It is written on the faces of children who eat porridge, youth who find work, farmers who get fair markets, and citizens who live with dignity. That is the only certificate worth framing.
Dr Kangata is the Governor of Murang’a County; Email: [email protected]
