MUGWE: Is Ruto failing his way to success?

SpaceX. This is a private aerospace company founded by Tesla and X CEO, Elon Musk. The company designs and manufactures spacecraft, rockets, satellites, and offers private citizens an opportunity to reserve space flight. Part of its mission statement is – “it’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past”.

Last month, SpaceX launched its second liftoff of the Starship rocket from the company’s facility in Texas. The rocket flew for more than seven minutes over the Gulf Coast. High in the sky, the compartments separated seamlessly through a technique that SpaceX was debuting during this flight.

Shortly after, the booster exploded but the flight could survive that. What was more critical was that the rocket was still flying. But then, as SpaceX mission control waited to hear a signal from the rocket, all they could hear was crickets. Silence. Something had gone wrong after the ship shut off its engines in preparation to coast along the edge of space. The self-destruct system kicked in, and the rocket blew itself up. The engineers acknowledged that several of the rocket’s 33 engines malfunctioned on ascent causing the explosion.

Many critics viewed this as a failure. And it was not the first of the company’s failures. Its first three launches were also failures followed by two successes.

Others however, including Musk himself viewed this as a vivid illustration of a spectacular successful failure that served the company well. Rather than seeing this as a setback, they hailed it as a success that went further than the previous attempts, and an opportunity to provide a wealth of data that will accelerate Starship’s development.

They said that if there were any more failures of this kind, then SpaceX would be on its way to Mars in the next four years. This is because with each failed launch, what was imperative was that none of the previous mistakes were repeated and they got to learn some new ones. SpaceX showed that incrementalism was the pathway to success.

On the home front, President Ruto has launched many initiatives that were hitherto not in the realm of consideration or implementation by previous administrations. These include among others the Hustler Fund, subsidizing production, school feeding programs, social health insurance fund, shujaa mtaani community health workers, government to government oil deal, national tree planting holiday, exporting youthful labor, multiple foreign trips, letting the shilling adjust to its real value, and the privatization of state assets.

These initiatives have not been without their failures or drawbacks. Consequently, these glitches have turned out to be fodder for the critics who have taken every opportunity to criticize them and their implementers, while offering a plethora of educated opinions from the comfort of their keyboards, and in front of television cameras as political pundits.

Begs the question, like Musk, is President Ruto’s administration failing its way to a national success? Are they like SpaceX using the failures to collect data that will incrementally correct and accelerate the implementation of these initiatives, which if successful will launch the nation into realizing its 2030 vision?

In today’s society, failure has become something to fear, avoid, shame, and therefore prevent at all costs. We seem to view failure as having no redeeming value and that it sucks to fail. At a national level, this is why we keep dishing out bailouts to companies like Kenya Airways and Mumias Sugar in the guise that they are too big to fail and in the guise of not creating additional unemployment; it is why we politicize the process of impeaching ineffective governors and commandeer their salvation behind the scenes rather than letting the counties fail; and why we continue funding state corporations from national coffers even when failure of their corporate governance makes them inefficient and loss making entities.

At a personal level, this is why today’s parents will do everything in their power to ensure their kids pass national exams including the extent of buying the exam papers before hand; it is also why we have rampant corruption because we want to be among the successful ones in society; it is why we steal infants from hospitals because we don’t want to be termed barren; and also why we will not accept election outcomes because we don’t want to be labelled serial failures.

We have conveniently ignored the irreplaceable role failure plays in our learning process as the voyage into the unknown. When we refuse to allow failure to happen, or we try to cushion its blows, we not only harm those who failed, but we also deny ourselves a key way to learn how best to allocate resources for innovation or change that drives progress and improves our lives. Because without failure, there would be no economic growth or improved human well-being.

In economic-speak, failure is known as the knowledge problem. It is how entrepreneurs discover new knowledge and better ways of producing things. But their endeavors frequently fail leading to over half of small businesses failing within the first five years. But failed entrepreneurial activity is just as critical as successful activity. New knowledge drives economic growth and creates prosperity.

I submit that failure should be a subject taught each week in our schools. Today we teach kids that failure is final. That it defines who and what they are. Hence the meme mwalimu wa maths. And we carry this false narrative to adulthood where we avoid failure at all costs by taking shortcuts every which way so as to not to fail.

But failure is the experiment that provides us with data that informs success through known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And the only way you can get this data is by launching, not theorizing about it as some of our policy makers, political pundits and critics have become experts at.

Finally, my unsolicited advice is to President Ruto. Your mantra should be – failure is an option. Make failure your friend. The only true sin is making the same mistake twice. So don’t be petrified to try and afraid to fail. Because failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of success. Your detractors will criticize you, mock you, discourage you, even ridicule you. But keep your eyes on the ball. Fail your way to success and let your detractors’ criticisms of your initiatives turn out to be the mere exchanging of shibboleths.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing – Dennis Waitley