As he journeys to the United Nations, Ambassador Martin Kimani offers a possibility, and this possibility is on behalf of Kenya but also for an unbowed and adaptive Africa that transforms and that is transforming into a place where the sun always rises towards many tomorrows of radical hope.
Today, we daily face the challenge of transforming the systems that guide our lives and engage all our minds, consciously and unconsciously, as we work through the profound questions raised by the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are questions about our ability to survive and thrive in a world in which we have severely depleted the environment. Other species are dying and our living context is dramatically less promising, in spite of our choice not to acknowledge this reality.
We also find ourselves in a world in which a few hoard the bounties and the majority suffer from material lack, oftentimes afflicted by the loss of the lives of their young. The questions of how we as a specie can thrive into the emerging future confront us in the face of systems of economics of scarcity that are largely modelled on Anglo-American shareholder fiction. Yet, these borrowed systems, which are largely inadequate for the challenges of the emergent future, are already entrenched across nearly all aspects of our lives.
For me, these are questions of transformation: How do we evolve our practices and our behaviour fundamentally so that we are supported by systems of abundant living and experience collective wellbeing?
Many people who design, develop and engage in transformation are often the targets of vilification and disdain. Perhaps because they hold up mirrors to society. Only in rare cases are such people tolerated for long or taken seriously enough for them to help us confront why and how we have to engage in profound changes. Even when their analysis are accepted and are utilised, it is my experience that they become the embodiment of what people dislike. If they are effective, they guide people and institutions to persistently ask those very questions that they and institutions would rather not confront. If these change agents are successful, they guide people and institutions to eventually sacrifice that which has become their traditions. At their best, they facilitate people and institutions to own, as well as develop new solutions themselves, so that they take charge of the way ahead.
Once the new way is found, the guide only serves to remind people of the pain and loss that has led to fundamental change. Invariably, what happens is that people claim that they made the change, not that anybody told them to make the change or that anybody helped them to make the change. All that is because the pain of making those changes actually becomes part of the things we do not want to remember. The cost of making those changes become personified in the people who guide us towards those changes.
If you are a facilitator, a driver of ideas, of profound changes, either in terms of the diagnosis of the problem and the process of identifying solutions or a guide towards the kinds of extreme decisions that are necessary to change behaviour, you are hardly ever celebrated.
However, Ambassador Martin Kimani is a unicorn; an exception who has made a career in the past two decades of guiding the transformation of systems. Unlike many people involved in transformation, he has worked within the systems he sought to change, often embraced by the very people who will eventually own those changes.
A relatively young man, Martin Kimani is in his late 40s. It is now like years ago, I think about 2011, over lunch in Nairobi, Kenya. I met him through Professor Funmi Olonisakin, current vice president and vice principal at King’s College London. Our interaction started around the idea of transformation, and I was fortunate enough to pitch him an idea of how to develop a transformative strategy for an organisation he was then leading, CEWARN. CEWARN is the conflict early warning system for the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). IGAD is the regional bloc of eight countries in the Horn of Africa and East Africa.
Over this chance lunch meeting, Dr. Kimani highlighted his challenge and I offered a way of developing a crowd-sourced solution. I assumed that because he was the head of CEWARN, what I proposed would be a straightforward process decided by his call as the director. My assumption was founded on the great interest and excitement that he showed for the proposed approach towards developing this strategy. It didn’t quite work out that way. Within three weeks, I was in a van going from the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to a resort in Hawassa. I and CEWARN staff went to this hotel owned by Haile Gebrselassie, the Olympic champion.
In my work across many organisations and with many leaders, I had never met anyone who risked so much for an idea and for the ideal of participation. I could not help but also reflect on the pattern of people who take the ideas of others and yet do not acknowledge contributions other than their own. Working with Dr. Kimani was an exceptional and high-quality collaboration, at odds with my life experience.
It was an engaging process that we got involved in. The critical decision Dr. Kimani made was that if we were going to proceed with the idea of facilitating transformation across eight countries, it would not be decided by himself as the director but by the collective ownership of all of his staff. So, I had to develop a process or, more accurately, a mini-process where we prototyped my idea with the staff, whom I was meeting for the first time. Fortunately, the staff worked through the plan for this Participatory Strategy Development and became the owners of the process.
There was no route map. We evolved as we worked through the communities and countries, from Djibouti through Somalia, across the nomadic clusters in Ethiopia, engaging with the national teams called CEWERU, especially those of Sudan and South Sudan. We fanned across the Horn, led by Dr. Kimani, into market places and rural clusters, all the way to Kenya and Uganda. My education about pastoralists was steep and fast. I came to understand the AK-47 as a tool of the herder, not just an assault rifle. The picture of the mother with a baby on one shoulder and an AK-47 slung over the other was no longer an abstract subject of sleepless debate between myself and Dr. Kimani.
Who would have thought it possible to work across eight countries, some of them coming out of wars, to help them look at the work of seven or eight years ahead? We aimed to ensure that the peoples of those countries would collaborate with each other, identify priorities and agree on a pathway to ensure that there would be less conflict in the region. We discussed with citizens how they would utilise the early warning system productively. We discussed with pastoralists and non-pastoralists, how they would stay engaged towards making sure there was less conflict. And particularly resource conflict in places like Dikhill, Turkana, names that were not known to me, people that were strangers to me, communities that I had not read enough about to be able to say I was even an expert.
Dr. Kimani had enough trust in me and what I was offering. Yes, I had done this sort of work in Ibadan, but Ibadan is a city of sedentary urban and peri-urban communities. Yes, I had done this kind of work in Lagos, but Lagos was another urban community, not comparable to these eight different countries. Nothing we did in Lagos was comparable in scale to the thousands of people we spoke to across eight countries. The courage that it took to say, let’s not just transform the process but help the people to transform their engagement with CEWARN, was a profound act of faith and leadership.
None of the stakeholders, not even Dr. Kimani, had done anything like we were doing. Even more challenging, no one had ever done a strategy so participatory on that scale and in that manner. Over the next year, we worked and developed a strategy that CEWARN used for the next seven years among nomadic people across the incredible vegetations down across the Horn of Africa. It was a profound, life-changing experience for all of us. We had trained people across these countries who could speak to people on the streets, who could engage in communities where there was conflict, who could design questionnaires that they could engage with. Towards the end, we engaged more partners. Our final collaborators were Group Partners, who eventually took the work across the finish line with the most engaging visual facilitation. Dr Kimani had risked his career and his position to achieve a ‘living strategy’.
In my work across many organisations and with many leaders, I had never met anyone who risked so much for an idea and for the ideal of participation. I could not help but also reflect on the pattern of people who take the ideas of others and yet do not acknowledge contributions other than their own. Working with Dr. Kimani was an exceptional and high-quality collaboration, at odds with my life experience. That profound act of leadership was the beginning of a friendship that still stands today.
The work we did became a much celebrated and successful one. Dr. Kimani became Kenya’s Permanent Representative and Head of Mission to the United Nations in Nairobi. The reward for him was to be moved from one hotspot to the next, in terms of being the leader that enabled transformation to occur. From his term guiding the UN System in Nairobi, his work moved on to countering violent terrorism in his country.
I have had the privilege, from afar and occasionally up close, of watching him exercise the kind of leadership that is necessary and the kind of discipline that is required to get fundamental change done. It has not been an easy path for Dr. Kimani. He has lost many friends whose activism ends with criticism and rarely with the responsibility for replacing what they do not like with an alternative. Of course, such people never take the risk of being unpopular for the greater good or effectiveness.
Ambassador Kimani’s work on countering violent terrorism led to fundamental changes, involving the engagement of the people of Kenya – including those young people, especially from early schooling – in being partners at identifying and guiding the work of better security, towards a more inclusive society with less social dislocation. It is the kind of design and dialogue that is accompanied by choices that will make terrorist acts a rarity in that country. After the horrors of lives lost and trauma caused by the Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Nairobi. Once again, a participatory system of problem-solving, rather than a directive one, evolved. It continues to amaze me how in every area where he has engaged, he has made such profound underlining change.
Of course, between the two of us, there have been times of silence and times of conversation from a distance. He reminded me recently that I told him that joining the government was capitulation because as a Pan-Africanist (both of us being Pan-Africanists) we hope to implement profound change across our continent. However, he has shown, in a very disciplined way, that change is the act and not just an expression of view, that there is collaboration to be fostered and bridges to be built in achieving systemic and sustainable change. Recently, he was one of the two secretaries of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr. Raila Odinga, both powerful forces and great leaders of their people in Kenya.
…the continuing lesson of Ambassador Kimani, a young man from anyone’s perspective, is to expose the inadequacy of expressions of anger as the hallmark of radical expression. Radical expression answers the question of how to turn the anger on the streets into action that is sustainable and that leads to better results, transformed systems and improved lived experiences.
In the course of this work with the BBI, we had many conversations. We especially talked about the profound and destabilising danger of a winner-take-all party politics in our multi-ethnic countries. The inevitable tyranny of a majority that is seen through ethnic lenses leads to destabilising conflicts. Again, where it is oppositional politics, it is rarely one that developing countries can afford, as we need all capable hands rowing towards a nationhood that is prosperous.
What never ceases to amaze me is, for a leader at such a high level, Dr. Kimani is always open to the battle of ideas, to the dialogue of finding solutions, to the deep work of finding the root cause and the design challenge of making profound change for our people. This stands in stark contrast to some of the people at similarly high levels in Nigeria with whom I have worked. They do not even give time to engage in the debate and dialogue of ideas, and they often frame issues in stark and extreme positions of good and bad.
I have not forgotten the speech Dr. Kimani gave at the launch of my book, Ọmọlúwàbí 2.0, which he kindly reviewed. His expression of what the possibility of Nigeria is and why the continent looks to Nigeria. Dr. Kimani is a rarity because he is able to look across the landscape and find the incredible golden seam of possibility of making profound change happen.
One of my best memories was reconciling the Dr. Kimani I saw in meeting with local people and the grace with which this man engaged the First Lady of Uganda, connecting her with the purpose of those from the hamlets and villages where we started. He is so at ease, not just with the people in the rural areas but also with the most powerful people. I knew then, and I mentioned it to him, that he was destined for the big things.
I say it with great respect that it takes an extraordinary human being to walk through the kinds of places we have been, the kinds of marketplaces where we spoke to people, with humility, yet still be able to speak to the powerful with clarity. We now stands in a new place as I write this because Ambassador Kimani is now going to be the representative of Kenya at the United Nations in New York, at a time when Kenya is in the Security Council. This is a profoundly powerful opportunity.
Reading through the reports of the parliamentary sitting on his appointment, the Parliament of Kenya in deciding whether Ambassador Kimani should get this new post wondered about his assets. This does not surprise me. They said that he ought not to have so few assets, ought not to be a poor man having held such powerful positions. They referred to his history of representing his country at the UN in Nairobi, with all the procurement opportunities as the ‘host’, and from there to the counter-terrorism role and then to being secretary of the BBI; all that access to great and powerful people, all that opportunity to exploit purchasing contracts. They seemed genuinely surprised that he was not richer than they could see. In fact, the total of his amassed assets was so insignificant to them that they believed he must have soaked his wealth away somewhere else. His answers did not surprise me. He has invested much of his resources in developing and educating himself, because at the core of his passion is the transformation of the position of his people, not just in Kenya but across the African continent.
It makes sense. Moving from his time in the United States, working in high finance, but choosing to go back to school for War Studies in King’s College London, suggests that his design was to engage and affect the world. It is in this light that we have to look at his leadership, an adaptive and bridging form of leadership, that looks for ways to get things done, that questions the piety of those of us who hold positions that never can be actioned. Ambassador Kimani’s work teaches us a lesson about real radical thought. That real radical thought is not an abstraction but a practice. It is a mission to mobilise in people their better angels. It is a commitment to deliver excellence as best as you can, to guide people to the point of creating prosperity for posterity.
The UN welcomes Ambassador Kimani to his new role, and I celebrate him, as someone who arguably is his older brother and who looks at daily life through the prism of the possibility of change. Here in Nigeria, we have spent the past few weeks with our youths stepping out of frustration into the expression of anger, where they have tried and continue to try to remind us of our commitment to be a better society. They ask us to move beyond the kind of shortcuts that turn our police into torturers and killers. They ask us to ensure our powerful, mostly men, step up to where they do not abuse our women, exploit our youth and undermine our society. That leadership becomes real guidance and collective commitment to better governance of our people.
Nevertheless, the continuing lesson of Ambassador Kimani, a young man from anyone’s perspective, is to expose the inadequacy of expressions of anger as the hallmark of radical expression. Radical expression answers the question of how to turn the anger on the streets into action that is sustainable and that leads to better results, transformed systems and improved lived experiences. Like most of us who have been on the streets have found, shouting becomes just a garland, a trinket of our youthful outrage inevitably.
As he journeys to the United Nations, Ambassador Martin Kimani offers a possibility, and this possibility is on behalf of Kenya but also for an unbowed and adaptive Africa that transforms and that is transforming into a place where the sun always rises towards many tomorrows of radical hope.
Adewale Ajadi, a lawyer, creative consultant and leadership expert, is author of Omoluwabi 2.0: A Code of Transformation in 21st Century Nigeria.
