There is a popular book titled 'What They Don't Teach you at Harvard Business School' by Mark H. McCormack. For those of us who didn't go to that prestigious school, this should be a compelling read. Nonetheless I haven't gotten around to read the book because that is not my kind of stuff - I would rather Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' or William Easterly's 'Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor '.
Now, Adan Mohammed, the Cabinet Secretary for Industrialization and Enterprise Development, went to Harvard Business School. I have no doubt that a prestigious school such as Harvard Business School teaches that strategic policy initiatives have a time lag before their positive effects can be seen; and that lag can stretch to a few years. In the modest schools that we went to (Oh. I have been to Economics Schools and not Business Schools), that is one of the issues we were repeatedly told.
Either Mr. Mohammed has forgotten (it has been a while since he was in that School) or he is being a good politician; for he imagines that all the good things in the Kenyan policy space happened over the last two years or as long as he has been in Government.
Just watch him say that! Here he is full or praises for the World Economic Forum and the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business ranking - which he links to the one and half year's that he has been in Cabinet. He nonetheless hints that some of these reforms could take some two to three years for their benefits to be seen, and this he does reluctantly on account of the prompting of the interviewer.
It is hard to believe that it is the same guy now sulking when the World Bank's latest Ease of Doing Business Raking simply tells us that we have been running around in circles. I do not want to call this intellectual dishonesty - there is nothing intellectual here. Oh, unless the concept of lagged effects of policy is part of "What they Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School".
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