A powerful leadership principle speaks almost directly to the reforming instinct we have seen throughout President William Ruto’s administration. It comes from the English writer G.K. Chesterton and is known as Chesterton’s Fence.
Imagine finding a fence blocking a road. You look at it, see no obvious purpose and immediately conclude that it should be removed. Chesterton’s warning is simple: if you cannot explain why someone erected that fence in the first place, you don’t yet understand enough to remove it. First establish its purpose. Then decide its fate.
Governance has a closely related rule of thumb: never fix what is not broken. This isn’t an argument against reform. Governments must reform failing institutions, modernise outdated systems and respond to changing circumstances. But reform requires diagnosis. There is a profound difference between repairing something because you understand why it has failed and changing it simply because you inherited it.
Was Everything Really Broken?
That distinction increasingly defines the debate around the Ruto presidency. President Ruto came into office with an extraordinary appetite for redesign. Healthcare changed. University financing changed. Housing policy changed. Tax arrangements shifted repeatedly. Agricultural interventions were redesigned. Government agencies were reorganised. New funds, programmes, platforms and administrative structures emerged in rapid succession.
Some of these reforms may have perfectly legitimate objectives. But taken together, they invite a larger question: Was everything really broken?
Consider healthcare. NHIF undoubtedly had serious weaknesses. Fraud, inadequate coverage, delayed payments and difficulties bringing informal workers into the insurance pool all demanded attention. But identifying problems within NHIF didn’t automatically justify dismantling the architecture and replacing it with the Social Health Authority.
The first question should have been: what was actually working? Millions of Kenyans understood NHIF. Employers had incorporated it into payroll systems. Hospitals had accumulated years of institutional experience dealing with it. Families understood, however imperfectly, what their membership meant. That accumulated institutional knowledge had value. Chesterton’s Fence would have required government to identify what worked, preserve it, repair what didn’t and replace only those elements that genuinely couldn’t be salvaged.
When Reform Creates a New Crisis
Higher education provides another illustration. Kenya’s university financing system was clearly under strain. Universities carried enormous debts, government financing was inadequate and legitimate questions existed about whether subsidies were equitable. Reform was therefore necessary. But education isn’t simply an accounting equation. Families need predictability. Students need to know what their education will cost. Universities require dependable revenue streams to plan courses, retain lecturers and maintain facilities.
A sophisticated funding formula that solves a Treasury problem while creating uncertainty for families may merely exchange one crisis for another. That is the deeper wisdom of Chesterton’s Fence: institutions contain accumulated experience that isn’t always visible to the person arriving with the toolbox.
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President Ruto’s governing instinct sometimes appears to favour comprehensive redesign over incremental improvement. The danger is turning the country into a permanent policy laboratory, with citizens effectively becoming the experimental subjects. Healthcare is being tested. University financing is being tested. Housing is being tested. Tax policy keeps changing. Agriculture experiences intervention after intervention. Eventually, citizens and institutions suffer reform fatigue.
The Cobra Effect in Public Policy
Another important lesson: good governance must anticipate second-order consequences. Suppose government introduces a new tax expecting additional revenue. The first-order calculation is straightforward: Treasury collects more money. But what happens afterward? Businesses may increase prices. Consumers may buy less. Companies may postpone investment. Entrepreneurs may retreat into informality. Some businesses may close altogether. Jobs disappear and taxable economic activity contracts. Consequently, the government may collect less than anticipated.
Economists often explain unintended incentives through the famous Cobra Effect. A government reportedly tried to reduce dangerous cobras by paying citizens for dead snakes. People quickly realised that breeding cobras could become profitable. When authorities eventually terminated the reward scheme, breeders released snakes that were no longer commercially useful. A programme intended to reduce cobras ended up producing more cobras. People respond to incentives. Every policymaker should remain humble in the face of that reality.
The problem with excessive reform, therefore, isn’t simply the disruption it causes. It is the assumption that government possesses sufficient knowledge to anticipate how millions of citizens, businesses and institutions will respond. It doesn’t. Institutions generally develop over time. Rules accumulate because societies encounter problems and construct protections against their recurrence. Some eventually become obsolete. Others become inefficient. Some are captured by vested interests and deserve to be dismantled altogether. But first, understand the fence.
Why Some Friction Was Built on Purpose
This principle becomes even more important when dealing with constitutional and independent institutions. Kenya deliberately removed certain functions from direct political control because earlier generations experienced the dangers of concentrating too much authority in the Executive. Independent commissions can appear cumbersome. Procurement rules can frustrate impatient leaders. Parliamentary approval takes time. Public participation slows decision-making. Judicial review can interrupt government programmes.
But perhaps some of that inconvenience is intentional. Democracy contains friction by design. Checks and balances inconvenience those exercising power precisely because history taught us what can happen when power becomes convenient, concentrated and unconstrained. Before weakening an institution because it appears slow, a president should first ask why Kenyans deliberately constructed it that way.
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President Ruto still has an opportunity to reconsider the philosophy behind his reforms. A presidential legacy doesn’t have to be measured by how many new institutions, acronyms, funds or programmes were created. Sometimes transformational leadership means taking existing institutions and making them work exceptionally well.
Repair before replacing. Improve before abolishing. Test before rolling out nationally. Consult before imposing. Above all, understand before changing.
Kenya certainly needs reform. We need functioning healthcare, affordable education, productive agriculture, sustainable public finances, efficient institutions and millions of meaningful jobs.
But reform must never become an addiction to novelty. A president isn’t elected to demonstrate how many systems he can redesign. He is elected to make citizens’ lives better. Sometimes that means constructing a new fence. Sometimes it means repairing the old one. Sometimes the greatest demonstration of presidential wisdom is discovering why the fence was built and having the humility to leave it standing.
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