I read The Dictator’s Handbook after watching this YouTube video called The Rules for Rulers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
It paints a grim view of leadership in general, but I felt it made sense.
In something the authors call the selectorate theory, they say that we can look at leadership as a way of allocating resources in a society. No ruler rules alone, he needs people to get him and keep him in leadership. It’s a quid pro quo thing, where in exchange for their support, the leader must please a certain number of people.
To please such people, a leader needs to raise funds to distribute to them either directly as money or indirectly as benefits (e.g. healthcare, education, etc). This is done through taxation, plunder of resources, and sometimes outright theft.
The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is the relative number of people (coalition) a leader needs to please. A dictator needs to please only a few, while a democratic leader needs to please many people.
That’s the basic reason why dictatorships are bad places to live in general. The leader, once he collects money, only needs to distribute it to a few people, each of whom gets quite a bit of it. That’s why the leader and his cronies live large, and that’s why they crush rebellion so ruthlessly, because so much is at stake.
But in democracies, to attain leadership one needs to balance the needs of too many people, so distributing money directly doesn’t make sense. It makes better sense to divide your people into constituencies and interests, and to offer them favourable laws, tax breaks, and other benefits as a group.
The grim reality of why more people die in natural and man-made disasters in dictatorships is because of this. In a democracy, ignoring people’s plight is a sure way to be voted out, but in a dictatorship, the leader can let people die because using money on them is taking away from the money he uses to please his coalition, you know, the people who can actually overthrow him. So it’s no wonder why leaders have different incentives.
In places with many natural resources, a leader doesn’t even need lots of people to work so as to raise money for his coalition, so of course he’d rather have them crushed and uneducated so as to provide slave labour. In a place like Kenya, a leader has to give people at least some freedoms because they need us to be somewhat productive to raise taxes. That’s why we’re better off than Nigeria. Maybe Turkana oil will change this who knows.
Another interesting thing was about corporate corruption and places like FIFA and the Olympic Committee. Such places are corrupt because the people you need to please and bribe are very few. If more people had a say in where the World Cup will be hosted, Qatar and Russia would never have been able to bribe their way. It’s just easier to let the process be fair.
In corporate settings, the CEO and his upper management and board cronies take excessive compensation compared to a company’s performance and dividends, because small shareholders have no power.
What about aid and debt? These, like taxes, are instruments of raising money for a leader’s coalition. Aid and debt rarely translate into benefits for the poor and vulnerable. It only does for those people a leader needs to please. Even in natural disasters like earthquakes, organisations providing help like UN find that in order to be allowed to assist, they need to bribe the leadership sometimes by giving them the food and rations which they sell in the black market.
There are so many insights the book provides, even about why western companies are corrupt and extractive in Africa but not at home. At home, corruption is difficult because it affects the leader’s coalition of many people, and the people can remove the leader.
Abroad, the leaders there only require to please a few, so they allow the foreign western companies to plunder their nation in exchange for bribes for the new essential backers at the top.
That’s why, even though they say they’re “spreading democracy”, western nations really don’t like it when we choose our own leaders because we’ll threaten their interests. They have overthrown many a democratically elected leader to impose their own puppets for this.
Why? Well, plundering other nations helps them raise funds to keep their massive coalitions at home happy. The authors asked their readers in the West: Do you want democracy to spread everywhere? Are you ashamed that your leaders seem to spread chaos to poorer countries in the name of democracy? What if I told you that lack of democracy and freedom in those countries is what enables you to have cheaper and greater comforts here, would you still want it for them?
A leader, of course, prefers that the coalition he depends on to be small. Small coalitions, though incentivising bad behaviour, also help a leader stay longer in power. That’s why even in democracies we have leaders exercising voter efficiency (coming to power through as few votes as possible) through stuff like gerrymandering, the Electoral College (it was initially there to protect Slave States’ interests), and voter ID laws.
Some parties are in power yet they have the support of sometimes less than 20% of the voters. Why do Democrats like minorities being able to vote? These people will vote for them. Republicans don’t want them voting and come up with restrictive voter ID laws to ensure they suppress them.
Applying the situation to Kenya, why do our leaders screw us? Well, our tendency to vote as blocs. If one wants a community’s support, he only requires to convince a few community leaders, through bribes of course (just a fact of politics). Then you acquire all the votes.
If our voting patterns were more fractured, anyone wanting to lead would need to convince so many of us to vote for them, so they would need to behave better lest we remove them. Now? Bad behaviour is not even punished, because we protect “mtu wetu”. How will this ever make our leaders want to behave well?
Why did IFMIS have a backdoor? The same issue of having a few people at the top. Systems like that have been made for ages, it’s ridiculous that the programmers couldn’t have seen and prevented these backdoors. The book actually gives an example of Githongo and Anglo Leasing. Githongo was an idealist, who actually believed in Kibaki’s government’s zero tolerance to corruption. He was quickly disabused of that notion (it was their time to eat) and fled. The corrupt people are still rich, Kenyans have already paid for their transgressions, and Githongo remains relatively a poor man.
Sometimes dictators can be good people. After paying their relatively few members of the coalition, “bad” dictators like Mobutu stashed away all the rest of the money for themselves. More “benevolent” ones direct the remaining money to help their people, like in Singapore and Rwanda. But, they have to pay their cronies first so as to be left with that money. Not paying leads to them being replaced.
But waiting for such good leaders is not optimal. We’ll have to go through so many of them. It’s not that Africans are inherently worse leaders. It’s just that they’re not constrained by large numbers of people to behave well.
Jubilee (and anyone at the helm in Kenya really) can borrow money and do projects without good returns for Wanjiku (and steal the rest outright) because the few people at the top will benefit. After all, even if the benefits don’t trickle down to us, we’ll still defend them as watu wetu. If we gave them hell, and replaced them regularly for misbehaviour, very few of them would do what they do.
But as it stands, they’ll continue to plunder without doing much for us, overtaxing salaried workers (hiyo deduction wanaongeza ya nyumba trust me itakulwa tu), ripping off farmers (in the West, for contrast, farmers are a powerful coalition so they normally get proper subsidies that benefit them), etc. We don’t (or can’t) hold them to account. The people who can, like the cronies huko juu, always benefit.
How can turn around the situation in Kenya? Sina all the answers. But we can start with stopping this bloc voting. Easier said than done, because it’s now a prisoner’s dilemma: if our community doesn’t vote as a bloc but the others do, we’re screwed out of leadership. Look at what happens to Western, a huge fractured bloc that can’t have its scions in the top seat.
All communities have to stop it at the same time. Maybe we’ll have to finish ethicity by killing our cultures, no matter how much we love them or the Constitution protects them. Adopt a “Kenyan” identity instead. We can also do it like Western Kenya and have numerous “supremos”. This increases competition for votes, and will only benefit Wanjiku.
Uhuru, Raila, and Ruto, being absolute leaders of huge tribes, have no incentive to be good leaders. If they had better challengers from within their communities, they would up their game.
Another thing is to deal with our leaders as individuals. Utaona MP decrying corruption aki-address his constituents but in Parliament, while in the safety of numbers, they pass greedy laws. What if all constituents told their leader “we’re watching you. Jaribu ujinga tukutoe.”
What we have now is, “aki MPigs are greedy!” Then later tunasema, “But wetu ako poa. Acha nikamuombe handout.” Since all constituents are doing this, bad leaders will never change. It’s always Bunge ni mbaya, but Mbunge wetu ako poa. Well, a lot of this greedy bunch is still in Parliament because of this.
Let’s move from “wanasiasa/serikali ni mbaya” to “person A ni mbaya” like Guka said. If the spotlight is on an individual, they’ll behave and work. We can’t allow leaders to blame amorphous cartels for their failures. If Sonko is being frustrated for instance, let him name names. “Cartels” apeleke mbali hatutaki hiyo excuse.
In conclusion, one may wonder, doesn’t increasing the coalition mean that more is plundered? Actually, no. If the people a leader needs to please are many, he can’t bribe us the way he does a few cronies. The money will not be enough to do it.
To please as many of us as possible (and retain his seat), he’ll have to build well equipped hospitals, pay workers properly, ensure Huruma developers build safe structures, ensure we have power and water as consistently as possible and not overcharge us for it (Apollo Mboya shouldn’t be fighting alone), ensure dams like Solai are safe, fine the owners and compensate victims if not, respond to fire disasters even in slums quickly, etc. After all, we’re holding him by the balls.
And if we still demand more from him than is available from resources in Kenya, why, he’ll start looking for other places in the world to plunder for our benefit.