Public servants must stop lecturing Kenyans

The president has been hitting the road lately meeting Kenyans in-situ and getting to feel the pulse on the ground in real time. He has not been travelling alone.

His entourage has been infested by public servants of all shades and colours, some speaking the way they like at perceived enemies of the government.

There’s a reason everyone who draw their pay from the public purse are referred to as public servants. The public gets to sweat at the mill weathering unbearable conditions under withering temperatures to pluck a chunk of their earnings towards a common pool to grease the wheels of government.

This sacrifice often comes at a painful cost; loss of precious family time with loved ones, eating unhealthy meals to save for personal development, travelling in passenger jalopies that fail the integrity test, and periodical medical checks for broken backs and torn sinews.

There is no amount of justification, however flimsy, for someone drawing their legitimacy and comfort from the sweat of Kenyans to talk down at them, regardless of the bleeding wounds in their bodies inflicted by negative public sentiment. This is one of the universal cardinal rules of governance that is bereft of exception.

There used to be a President of Kenya called Mwai Kibaki. For all intents and purposes, he’s considered as the greatest rulebook of how Kenyan public servants should handle unflattering energy they receive from those feeling the negative effects of public policy.

Considered, far and away, the brightest bulb in any of the classes he has ever shared with his mates, Kibaki’s standard response to anyone who dared came close to getting under his skin was a generous sneer, at best; or a blank turning-a-blind-eye-to, at worst.

Servant leadership

Many argue that by assuming the presidency at an advanced age of 71, he had the enviable benefit of having gone full circle into recovering from the after effects of the vagaries of power and its attendant excesses. It did help him a great deal, too, the experts say, that he landed at State House in a wheelchair having gone through a life threatening road crash prior.

When you have your life flashing across your eyes in a near-death experience, your outlook towards life tends to change to the direction of magnanimity. Mr Kibaki exemplified this by focusing his energy on his desk job, and this saved him from getting distracted by every knock on his door, especially by those not keen to pull towards the direction of progress.

By talking down at members of the public whose only crime is wishing bad things to happen to those in power, the public servants who have gained notoriety for this behaviour not only embolden the noise but also have allowed themselves to get distracted. The Kenya Kwanza regime is almost nearing their half-term point; they cannot afford to train their eyes on sideshows when an expectant nation is begging for laser focus.

This is not to say that public servants have no license to be aggrieved – not at all. We are human, and to be get your nerve endings frayed is part of what confirms our being alive. It’s normal to burn your fuse once in a while when you feel someone has unfairly pressed a pin on your soft parts. Pain is not only instinctive, it is also personal.

Therefore, it is perfectly in order for public servants to adhere to Sir Isaac Newton’s 3rd Law of motion: Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. It is the scientific thing to do. Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) approves this message on behalf of all terrestrial and extraterrestrial organisms, known and still unknown.

However, burning your fuse each time someone rails you up the wall is not the holy grail of public service, and should not be the standard unit for servant leadership. In actual fact, those who went to university to study electrical and electronics engineering advise that if your meter box ever has this particular fuse that burns each time an electric current runs through it, then it’s either the fuse be upgraded to a higher capacity or be replaced altogether before the entire house goes up in flames inevitably.

Better governance

For a government that prides itself in listening to the experts, this is one expert advise it should engrave in stone whenever public anger begin to show signs of boiling over.

This country is one of the most magnificent in the world. If you want to prove it, look at the number of tourists currently hogging our sandy beaches and other star attractions buying time as the harsh winter in the global North begins to die down from next month. Our position in the geographical tropics means we are right at the navel of Mother Earth – neither too hot nor too cold.

Those who have paid us a visit keep telling us how God was unfair to them to gift us this land that need little technology to harness its full potential, and we should believe them because some of them were given hellholes to make sense of, and they have done well for themselves with the little they have.

There is need for leaders to hearken to their oath of office and meet the public halfway in whatever policy decision they embark on in the interest of public participation. Much of the rage that we have witnessed since the new regime came into office can partly be attributed to the tone-deaf attitude that we have approached public service, and partly because of the individuals that have previously been entrusted with articulating policy decisions that have impact on the daily lives of those directed affected, usually at the lower rungs of the economic food chain.

Public servants should know that for as long as the taxpayer bleeds for the government to run, they will always hold both the yam and the knife in defense of public interest, and the only favour public servants can do to them is to be humble in service since all those positions are transiently held in trust.

Let us tone down on lashing back at victims of public policy whose only crime is raising awareness for better governance. The methods of dissent might be vile and uncultured, even bordering on criminality, but the main goal should never be lost – that all Kenyans desire of a country that works for everyone, and whoever practices the politics of exclusion has no place in modern society.

This is the word of the Lord.