Sixty years, one instrument, and a yardstick that does not move

Four administrations, four volumes, and the same scoring instrument applied to each. The discipline is not in the scores. It is in refusing to adjust the instrument between them.

Retrospective evaluation of government is usually where method goes to die. The instrument gets tuned, volume by volume, until each administration is judged on the terms most flattering or most damning to it. The Kenya Presidencies series was built to make that impossible: sixty years of Kenyan executive government scored on one instrument that does not move between volumes.

What that produces is uncomfortable in both directions. Volume I records a strong material record under the Kenyatta administration — life expectancy from 50.8 to 58.2 years, infant mortality from 100.7 to 72.5 per 1,000, real GDP compounding at 6.80 per cent a year — and still reports a Strategic Integrity Score of 42.20, because the Safeguarding Veto fired. Volume II returns the lowest composite in the series, 31.60, resting on the highest evidence rating in it, 79.30. The weak result rests on the stronger record, and saying so is the point.

Volume III is where the instrument earns its keep. The Kibaki administration scores 52.80 on the arithmetic, the highest in the series, and the Safeguarding Veto caps the reportable band anyway. That the cap is decisive there, rather than merely restating a band the arithmetic had already reached, is itself recorded as a finding rather than smoothed away.

Four rival explanations for the growth in Volume I survive testing. So the evaluation says the evidence supports and declines to say caused. That distinction is the whole difference between an evaluation and an argument.