In 7th-century BCE Athens, power was tightly hoarded by landowning elites known as the Eupatridae. They bartered public offices and relied on family connections, ensuring that positions went not to those most qualified, but to those with the money and connections to secure them. Over the next two centuries, recurring socio-political crises, class conflict, and anti-aristocratic reforms forced Athens to shift from this oligarchy toward the adoption of sortition, which means selection by lot.
The Athenians had learned a painful lesson. When people are given the power to choose who gets a scarce public position, personal connections and patronage easily influence that decision. Rather than relying on human judgement, they sought to remove the opportunity for favoritism altogether.
They did this through the kleroterion, which is a stone device with rows of slots into which citizens placed their identity tokens. Citizens who were eligible for public office were entered into a selection pool with their names represented by small identification tokens known as pinakia. These tokens were placed in the kleroterion and a random mechanism using black and white balls determined which citizens were selected to serve in public positions.
The principle was simple. If ten qualified citizens were competing for one public position, why allow a powerful individual to decide who gets it? Let chance decide. By removing personal discretion from the selection process, the Athenians made it impossible for the wealthy and those who had family connections or political patronage to determine who served in public office.
The public jobs auction
This week, from a public podium, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Hon. Moses Wetang’ula, confessed that MPs are taken to State House and handed teaching appointment letters to carry back to their constituents. He further alleged that these letters were subsequently sold to desperate job seekers and the clearing price was as much as four hundred thousand a piece. Meanwhile, the graduates who finished college several years ago are still waiting, unconnected, for a letter merit alone was meant to earn them.
He was not the first principal of the state to describe the machinery out loud. At the burial of former Emurua Dikirr MP Johanna Ng’eno, President Ruto addressed the case of a young man who had secured a teaching appointment but died before drawing his first salary. Ruto stated that the teaching letter would be given to the young man’s sister, whom he understood was also educated. Whatever the human warmth in that gesture, it confirmed a system in which public appointments are treated as discretionary favors, transferable through personal intervention, rather than governed by transparent, merit-based rules.
Before we throw stones, let’s take a walk to the barracks. Every KDF recruitment drive in living memory has drawn the identical modus operandi. In 2021, senators told Parliament that slots were going to the highest bidder. This year, a senator recounted a constituent who offered to sell the family bull to raise the money for his son’s enlistment.
While still at it, let’s take a walk to the police line. In 2014, the High Court nullified the recruitment of ten thousand officers in its entirety, after the policing oversight authority showed the exercise to be soaked in bribery, tribalism and nepotism. A similar recruitment had been cancelled in 2005 when the anti-corruption chief of the era, Justice Ringera, observed that a stream of law enforcement had been polluted at the source.
Three services. Three independent commissions. Three administrations. One unbroken pattern.
It begs the question: if the gate to every public career can be given, withheld, or sold, whose gate is it?
The answer the 2010 Constitution intended was nobody’s and everybody’s. The whole architecture of independent commissions exists for precisely one reason: to sever the act of hiring from the reflex of patronage, so that a vacancy in Turkana is not settled by loyalties in Nairobi.
That so many recruitments across so many regimes have failed the same way tells us the disease is not lodged in any particular politician. It is systemic. We built merit institutions on paper and left untouched the two forces that were always going to overwhelm them. One, a flood of qualified young people with nowhere to go, and two, a trickle of funded posts with no honest rule for rationing them.
That rationing gap is the part almost no one names, and it is the heart of the matter. When ten thousand genuinely qualified applicants present themselves for three hundred slots, merit stops being able to choose, because nearly everyone at the gate has already cleared the bar. At that moment, a second, tie-breaking mechanism must take over, and if the state has not designed a legitimate one, an illegitimate one rushes in to fill the vacuum.
What we are witnessing is not, at bottom, a morality tale about greedy politicians. It is commodified gatekeeping. This is the predictable consequence of qualified supply vastly exceeding budgeted demand, with no lawful mechanism to govern the gap. Athens confronted a similar problem by using a machine that could not be bribed, the kleroterion.
In our case, we left the gap to discretion, and the market moved in, where a public good migrates across three categories. A teaching post begins life as a merit good, allocated in principle to whoever is best qualified and has waited the longest. Somewhere along the way, it morphs into a patronage good allocated to whoever is most loyal or connected to a distributor. And once it is a patronage good, it takes only the slightest push to become a market good allocated to whoever can pay four hundred thousand shillings. Each step becomes a further privatization of something that was meant to belong to all of us, and the last step, the price tag, is not an aberration. It is the logical destination, because a thing that can be given as a favor can always in the end be sold for a fee.
We must widen this argument because the commodified gate is not only the state’s payroll. Long before a political aspirant is in a position to hand out teaching employment letters, many must first buy the right to, by purchasing party nomination tickets from the political party gatekeepers. What this means structurally is that the politician who pays for his nomination ticket is buying the future franchise to sell public slots at the bottom. The patronage system, therefore, is not a scatter of unrelated scams, but a single vertically integrated enterprise, in which today’s procured nomination is tomorrow’s bundle of appointment letters. The buyer and the seller are, across a few years, the same man.
Let’s descend now to the base of the ladder, to the parent at the school gate pressing an envelope on the head teacher’s palm to secure a Form One slot at the coveted secondary school. Patronage is a fluid. Dam it in one channel, and it seeps into the next. The parent’s envelope is evidence of how relentlessly the fluid hunts for the crack.
As evidenced, the pattern extends far beyond teaching slots, into many sectors where demand for public opportunities vastly exceeds the positions available. But recognizing this pattern is not an apologia for State House issuing appointment letters. It is an argument for confronting the institutional vacuum that makes such intervention politically valuable in the first place. When formal systems cannot credibly allocate scarce opportunities, political discretion fills the space, and those who control that discretion acquire the power to reward, favour and exclude. The problem, therefore, is not simply that State House intervenes; it is that the system has made intervention both possible and politically useful.
Some politicians in the opposition have, under the pretext of calling out this patronage, revealed a more uncomfortable grievance. They are not opposed to the machine. They are opposed to being shut out of it. When MP Arama protests that he has been denied his share of appointment letters, the substance of his complaint is not that the conveyor belt should be dismantled, but that he should be allowed to stand at it. Sifuna’s criticism, too, risks becoming less a rejection of patronage itself than an objection to who controls the machinery of distribution.
That should trouble anyone hoping the opposition is the cure. The grievance is not that the state operates a patronage machine, but that the wrong hands are operating it. That is not an alternative to patronage. It is a claim for a turn at it. A politics organized around such a grievance does not dismantle the machine when power changes hands. It simply re-points the hopper. The letters, in this sense, have no genuine opponents, only rival claimants waiting to become the next owners of the letter.
I submit that rather than complain ad infinitum about this patronage system, similar to the Athenians, we should adopt the mechanism of sortition. However, ours would be a stratified sortition, because our population is neither uniform nor equally represented.
I challenge us to innovate an AI-enabled kleroterion, a transparent digital system that will identify eligible candidates, verify their qualifications, place them into appropriate strata according to predetermined and transparent rules, and then use a randomized process to allocate scarce public opportunities.
This would not replace merit with chance. Merit would determine who enters the pool, and chance would determine who gets the opportunity from among the qualified. By removing discretion from the final allocation, we could make it far harder for money, connections or political patronage to determine who gets ahead.
The willing buyer
Finally, my unsolicited advice is to Wanjiku. Look in the mirror. We tell ourselves that this is a story about power. We comfort ourselves that a change of leadership will end it. It will not. A machine this old and this profitable cannot be dismantled by any politician currently locked out of it. It will merely be re-pointed the moment he gets in. And the machine does not run on the greed of politicians alone. It also runs on the parent with the envelope, and the aspirant with the ticket. It runs on all of us who, offered the shortcut, take it and call it love for our children, or realism about our country.
Commodified gatekeeping survives because at every rung, there is a willing buyer. The reform that matters most is not catching the sellers. It is our own refusal, finally, to queue at a gate we know should have no price.
We have met the enemy and he is us — Walt Kelly