There’s no need to humiliate seekers of public office

Mukhisa Kituyi. Photo/FILE

By MUKHISA KITUYI
Posted  Friday, May 13 2011 at 15:00

The vetting of candidates for Chief Justice and Deputy Chief Justice has been interestingly instructive.

As Kenyans deepen the roots of a new democratic order, open vetting is going to increasingly become an important practice in recruiting holders of high public office for a long time to come.

Getting it right this early will help make it work best. For nearly eight years now, public hearings by parliamentary committees have given us a glimpse of how the mighty and potentially mighty can be scrutinised and be made to confront their past.

But it is the recruitment and vetting of nominees and candidates for constitutional offices that are setting the pace for a fixating public opera that will remain with us for a long time.

From afar, one of the surprising discoveries I noted is that our judiciary is dominated at the highest level, by people with a first degree.

Just as other sectors of public life have moved on, we need to raise the academic bar of entry into higher judicial service.

Without contesting the legal competence of these my lords, the learned ladies and gentlemen will appreciate that there is a certain broadness brought to your intellectual application by graduate school that no amount of experience can substitute.

One possible alternative is to make a law degree a graduate school degree. That one must have a first degree in other disciplines before admission to study law.

This has long been the practice in USA and has recently been embraced by countries like Ghana to apparent popular gratification.

It has been argued in some circles that the public scrutiny of potential holders of high office accords the public an opportunity to follow a transparent route to confirm the credibility of holders of public office.

It is like recruiting police trainees through open running, where all can judge who comes in first. Thus, it is assumed, we see fairness in open play and know what we are buying into.

The very good candidates who get to assume office are vindicated by the approval not just by the vetting team, but also by the viewing public so conspicuously thrust in by the media.

This is partly true. If public vetting had come earlier, Kenya would have avoided certain outrageous appointments that we suffered over the years.

While this is the strongest ground for justifying the vetting principle, its practice is not without fault.

First, the assumption that the public or even the panelists assign comparable scores to each candidate on the basis of their showing is ridiculous.

Indeed, we must brace for the days when every one of us will turn into an expert in saying who should have won; and manufacturing reasons as to why our favourites lost.

Worse still, is the very easy temptation to import power games into interviews. It is a common weakness that when recruiting, vetting or interrogating others, humans act as if they are on a higher pedestal than those before them.

Often this can degenerate into unpleasant affront to the interviewee. A case in point is the very personalised way Gor Sungu, as chair of a select committee of Parliament, interrogated Nicholas Biwott during the parliamentary investigation into the death of Dr Robert Ouko a few years ago.

A few times this posturing has sullied the work of parliamentary audit committees. Flashes of this tendency have been manifest in pronouncements by some members of the Judicial Service Commission in the recent interviews.

A trait that has been even more prominent and disconcerting is the desire to find some filth in a candidate’s past and humiliate them on live TV.

To the plebian soul this makes for high drama. This is what they bought into when seeking high office, you might say. But is this really a habit we want to institutionalise as a method of choosing our managers?

When interviews revert into a theatre of shredding people’s image often on matters that bear little to the job they seek, do we care about what long-term damage we commit to those poor souls?

Do we all appreciate the ruined careers of some who do not get the jobs they appeared for?

Is it any wonder that where the rules of engagement are undefined, some really great candidates for high public office are scared off for fear of public humiliation?

As we institutionalise vetting for constitutional offices, we need a code of conduct defining the delicate divide between legitimate scrutiny and public humiliation.

This way, we will scare away the unqualified, validate the tenure of the recruited, without acting like hungry hounds enjoying lowering the image of those who otherwise stood out for their illustrious careers.

Dr Kituyi is the director of The Kenya Institue of Governance and currently a visiting fellow of The Brookings Institution in Washington DC.