Kenya Kwanza's tragi-comedy of stuttering communications

Kenya Kwanza’s tragic comedy of errors made its way into the international space once again this week. At the heart of it was President William Ruto’s lamentation over being abandoned with the ill-advised Haiti Mission. But, back home the nation was in shock at the casual disclosure of the fate of a police officer whose whereabouts in Haiti remain a mystery. 

The tragic comedy speaks to limping leadership, failure in government communications, and crying inelegance on the diplomatic landscape, all at once.

After six months of State frolicking on the disappearance of police constable Benedict Kabiru, the Kenya government eventually dropped the bombshell in faraway New York. Canvassing for fresh support for the UN-backed Multinational Security Mission (MSS) in Haiti, President William Ruto cut the matter to the chess, with icy coldness.

“I must use this opportunity to honour the Kenyan officers, Samuel Tompei, Benedict Kabiru, and Kennedy Nzuve, who lost their lives in the line of duty,” President Ruto said, in America. 

Back home, Kabiru’s family was all along waiting for a word of hope and encouragement about their relative. Reports from the gang-dominated collapsed state of Haiti indicated that Kabiru could not be accounted for, following an ambush on Kenyan officers on the island nation. In the official language of combat, Kabiru has been an officer who went missing in action (MIA). 

To say of an officer that they are missing in action is to state that they have been involved in an armed operation, but that their fate remains unknown at the end of the action. The action may be proactive, in which they raised the siege, or it may be reactive, in which the siege was raised against them. At the end of the action, every combatant must be accounted for. They may survive and escape unscathed, they may be injured, or they may even be killed. They are accounted for accordingly. But when someone does not fall into any of these three categories, they are said to be MIA.

In March this year, Kabiru went MIA. His family and country have anxiously waited to be told that he has been found, dead or alive. The government has been cagey, wanting to wish the matter away. At the start of this month, MSS released an official statement on the matter. They said that only two Kenyan officers had so far been killed in Haiti. Their names were Samuel Tompei and Kennedy Nzuve. Kabiru’s family had every reason to nurse the hope of getting reunited with him, someday.

The thread of hope was that Kabiru may have been wounded, or that he may have been captured by the gangsters, or even that he had escaped and was hiding somewhere. The critical fact of the matter was that his condition could not be officially confirmed, nor could his whereabouts. The uncertainty of being dead or alive was good enough to hang on to, despite the overwhelming anxiety. The frail flame of this candle kept the family, and the Kenyan nation going.

Then came the clumsy presidential bombshell from New York. Was the President misled? Or did he have a full dossier on Kabiru?  It is telling that subsequent to the presidential announcement of Kabiru’s death, the Attorney General has told the courts that her office is not aware that he is dead. So, what is happening to official communications in Government? One thing any government should never lose is credibility of its official communication. This is critical in substance and style; place and timing; manner of delivery, as well as the impeccable credentials of the messenger.

There must be reliable substance, as well as trustworthy authority and order to all state communication. It matters not how insignificant the message and moment may seem to be. What looks like a minor matter in a negligible moment has the potential of the mustard seed. It germinates to grow into a gargantuan messy tree that could leave the regime staggering for a long, long time, or even send it home prematurely.

If an officer disappears in combat, the first thing, in line with disciplined protocol, is for the officer’s unit to report them to their immediate command authority as missing in action (MIA). The uncertainty of their condition is officially acknowledged, within the ranks and orders. An investigation and search is then launched. It seeks to determine what happened. Are there any eyewitness accounts? Do intelligence sources have any useful reports? Could neutral entities help to determine if the person has been taken hostage, or is dead behind enemy lines?

You do not rush to declare them dead, as has been done in the case of Benedict Kabiru, unless you have all your facts together, even with the possibility that the body has been recovered; or its whereabouts are definitively known.  For either recovery of the body, or irrefutable definitive reports are obligatory before an officer is announced as dead. In the case of Kabiru, there has been no evidence (leave alone proof) that he was killed during combat and his body recovered. Nor has there been evidence that he is being held hostage (prisoner of war) by the enemy.

What did President Ruto know before dropping his bombshell? Kenya’s civil law standards borrow from the British, who brought with them Commonwealth traditions during the colonial presence. Did the State exhaust these standards ahead of the President’s formal statement to the United Nations? In our country, it is only after investigations produce enough evidence and attendant legal processes have been addressed that a person like Kabiru may be presumed dead.

In announcing this presumption, the emotional weight of the matter to the family must be taken into account. An officer whose body is not returned to the family for final farewell rites leaves them no room for closure. The import of this alone would make governments commit to never abandoning the search. In most jurisdictions, the search would go on for up to seven years. That is the case in Kenya, too. Hence, for President Ruto to declare Kabiru dead only after six months, his officers must have given him sufficient evidence!

Yet, even if the evidence and proof was there, did this matter require more delicate handling than has been the case? Killed, missing, or captured, you don’t just drop the bombshell, from New York, or from anywhere else. For families to find out about the tragic fate of their relative through the Media is the height of callousness on the part of the authorities. Traditionally, a specially trained officer was charged with this duty. Such an officer may be a chaplain, for example, or some special counsellor. They would be the people to approach families and delicately present to them the available facts. They would not speculate beyond what is known, that the person was missing in action.

They would approach the family while very well aware that they could meet denial, shock and, certainly, a profound sense of grief. For, the missing person was not just an officer. This person was a son, a husband, a father, and so many other things that his uniform did not say. His relatives were men and women of flesh and blood. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “If you prick them, do they not bleed? if you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die?”  If you shock them, do they not grieve?

The Kabiru family and Kenyan citizens of goodwill find themselves in a very delicate and painful place. Just why did Ruto make this unmethodical disclosure that has emotionally stunned the Kabiru family? Did he just want to dramatize Kenya’s controversial presence in Haiti? It was clear from the rest of the address that Ruto was playing the emotional card. He also bandied about the Black Peoples of the World card, declaring them to be a party of global humanity, and who deserved humane treatment in the global comity of nations.

In the process, we also read the desire for Ruto to position himself, and his presumed moral authority, as a pan-Africanist, a globalist and a humanist. Yet are these merits lost at the altar of coldness to family sensibilities? Did it not seem to matter to the President and his communications professionals that they were playing bad games with the emotions of an already troubled family? Did they ignore the reality that families want clarity about their relatives who go out on armed missions? Are they not aware of the lifelong trauma that cold bureaucracy, rumours, and casual insensitivity will afflict upon families that lose their people in action?

Whatever the case, families are families. They must be informed first, and in private, too. What the world is witnessing is either a Kenyan President who jumps the gun, or has a clueless communications team, or both. Ruto may have received plausible reports from the police service that there were compelling reasons to presume Constable Kabiru dead. He may have seen the political capital this could bring him on the international stage. Yet, he ought not to have cast common decency into the trash can, in exchange for political expediency. State House, the Police and the Presidency jointly stand accused. Throughout the world, the Military and the Police insist on families being the first recipients of tragic information concerning their relatives.

Also sleeping on the job is the Ministry of Interior. But this is their specialty. In the future, they will want to consider dispatching a professional notification team to affected families, to delicately break the bad news to them. They will deliver clear face-to-face messages, with compassionate clarity. They will want to allow the family to process this for a couple of days, before going public. To help them process the matter and manage emotions, they will want to throw in professional counselling, which would include how to manage themselves in the avalanche of public reaction, after the lid is lifted.

Yet, public communication is easily the biggest zone in the soft underbelly of the Ruto government. From the very outset, it has been riddled with troubling communication blunders. A regime that came to power waving bottom-up pennons has distinguished itself for abrupt top-down edicts. From taxation to healthcare, and from housing levies to compulsory digital procurement, the style has been the same. The President takes charge from the start. There is no room to wangle out when the big man has spoken, or stumbled.

The person to teach President Ruto how to communicate is not yet born. Hence, everywhere all the time, he speaks in a gusty campaign style. He does not differentiate between sober address of delicate issues, and fiery address of issues in the mud of politics. The register is the same, everywhere, all the time. His form and content is invariably combative and defensive; even where it should be persuasive and reassuring.

Worse still, Ruto pays no attention to his personal ethos; what the public thinks of him, and to the pathos of public communications (what the public wants to be addressed, or even to hear). His public speeches are rich in blank rhetorical promises, calls for personal sacrifice, and imagined glorious futures. Way after his sugar-candy mountain timelines have lapsed, he will not bother to explain what went wrong. Three years ago, he promised to bring down government borrowing to zero, within two years. Way past the deadline, borrowing has gone through the roof. No explanation has been given.

Separately, the health sector is in turmoil, with a failed social health insurance fund. Ruto and his ministers shout from rooftops the imagined success of the fund. They deafen public ears with statistical successes from the land of imagination. In their competition to outdo each other in Kenya Kwanza’s imagined delivery, Cabinet Secretaries and compliant MPs often contradict each other. They paint the portrait of a government without coordination.

And when he arrives, the President anxiously wants to go straight for the microphone. He wants to go first, and often does so, becoming the master of ceremonies and chief speaker at once. Where others must speak first, he restlessly fidgets in his chair, eager to take the conch from them. The tragic case of the Kabiru family is in line with the established code in Ruto’s culture of “top-down-optics-first” communications. 

The Ruto government will in the end be remembered for its insensitive, tone-deaf, out of touch communications; with Ruto as lecturer-in-chief. An angry government that has eroded public trust by failing to embrace measured, methodical, professional communications. They excel in indisciplined, combative, inconsistent, internally contradictory and untrustworthy communications and messages.