Ali AwDoll
Nairobi, Kenya.
How a senator’s attempt to display tech expertise instead revealed a glaring knowledge gap and the familiar problem of performative dominance masquerading as oversight.
At a recent Senate County Public Accounts Committee hearing, the Machakos Governor, accompanied by county officials, appeared before the committee to respond to routine audit queries.
Among the officials present was the County Chief Officer for ICT, prepared to clarify questions about the county’s digital payment system.
What followed, however, was less a technical clarification and more a brief but memorable seminar on the hazards of interrogating technology armed only with polished English phrases and a handful of foundational computing terms.
Parliamentary oversight is one of the most serious functions of a legislature. In theory, it is the moment when public institutions pause, breathe, and submit themselves to disciplined scrutiny. Senators ask careful questions. Governors and officials provide explanations. The public learns something useful. In theory.
In practice, oversight occasionally mutates into something else entirely: a theatre production titled “Confidence Meets Partial Understanding.”
The recent exchange between the Senate Committee’s Chairperson and the Machakos County Chief Officer for ICT, belongs comfortably in this genre.
Act I: Establishing Authority
The opening move is textbook.
The Senator asks the officer:
“Are you an IT professional?”
The officer replies politely:
“Yes.”
The Senator presses further. What qualifies him to say so?
The officer answers that he holds a Master’s degree in Data Communication.
This is not a minor credential. Data communication concerns the architecture of networks, protocols, data transmission and system infrastructure. In other words, the plumbing that allows the digital world to function.
But the hearing proceeds as though the officer had just claimed expertise after successfully installing Microsoft Word.
Act II: The Great Discovery of Computers
The interrogation then begins a remarkable journey through the basic anatomy of computing.
The Senator proceeds carefully.
Does the application run on a database?
Yes.
Does it run on an operating system?
Yes.
Does it run on hardware?
Yes.
One half expects the next question to be:
“Does it also run on electricity? And has the county purchased sufficient oxygen for the servers to continue breathing?”
For the benefit of the chamber, the Senator slowly reconstructs the technological ecosystem, unveiling with great seriousness ideas the computing world settled in the late 1970s.
The officer answers patiently, perhaps wondering whether the Senate might next confirm that the system also uses keyboards.
Act III: The Open-Source Panic
Then comes the Senator’s dramatic revelation.
With great authority, he declares:
“There is no way you can run an industrial-scale application using open-source tools without spending something. If you do, it is an amateur application.”
At this point the global technology sector pauses its work.
“Somewhere in California, Google engineers briefly check whether their entire infrastructure has accidentally become amateur. In Seattle, Amazon begins reconsidering its reliance on Linux.”
Netflix contemplates informing its subscribers that the global streaming platform they enjoy every evening has apparently been powered by amateur tools all along.
Across the internet, thousands of open-source systems begin nervously awaiting Kenya’s Senate certification.
All it took to uncover this global mistake was a committee session in Nairobi.
Act IV: The Officer’s Predicament
The Chief Officer now finds himself in a situation familiar to technical professionals everywhere. He understands the system they built. He understands the difference between software licensing costs and infrastructure costs. He understands that software developed internally may legitimately incur zero additional licensing cost. But he also understands something else.
He is sitting before a Senate committee.
The Senator is speaking with growing confidence. And the safest strategy in such moments is often strategic politeness.
So the officer does what professionals often do when confronted with authoritative misunderstanding. He simplifies. He nods.
He allows the moment to pass.
In short,
“the man who understands the system politely allows the man who does not to win the room.”
Act V: The Parliamentary Choreography
The episode illustrates a glaring weakness that occasionally afflicts parliamentary oversight.
Instead of pursuing clarity, questioning drifts toward performative dominance.
The choreography becomes predictable:
The officer begins explaining something technical.
The Senator interrupts halfway.
The Senator explains the system to the person who built it.
The record now reflects that the Senator understands the system.
By the end of the exchange, the witness has spoken less than the interrogator.
It is a curious model of inquiry in which the answers are supplied by the person asking the questions.
The New Meaning of Oversight
There is also a deeper institutional habit emerging in such hearings.
In theory, Senate oversight exists to ensure that public resources are used properly and that county governments remain accountable to the law and to citizens.
In practice, some hearings have begun to resemble something slightly different.
Oversight risks acquiring a new operational meaning:
Bullying governors.
Humiliating county officers.
Drowning facts and genuine explanations in popular rumours.
And ensuring that, by the end of the session, counties appear not just mistaken, but corrupt to the core.
The formula is efficient.
A governor and their officers arrive before a Senate committee prepared to respond to queries.
The explanation begins.
A senator, nay, several senators interrupt midway.
The interruption, often untethered to the facts, becomes the official account of the matter before the committee.
And with that straw-man argument in place, the issue is conveniently reframed and the hearing concludes with the satisfying impression that another governor and their county government have been firmly put in their place.
The difficulty with this approach is that it produces excellent television, viral social media moments, and a perfect stage for an already angry public to vent its fury about corruption.
But it rarely produces good understanding.
Public administration is not improved when technical explanations are replaced by rhetorical certainty.
Oversight, at its best, clarifies systems and uncovers truth. It is not a stage on which authority performs for applause.
A Small Technical Clarification
For the record, the officer’s explanation actually made sense.
A county system like MatchaPay could easily be: developed internally using .NET built on open-source components hosted on existing county infrastructure maintained by the county’s own IT team. Under such conditions, it is entirely reasonable to say no additional software licensing costs were incurred.
This does not mean the system runs on magic.
It simply means the county did not purchase a commercial software licence.
But by the time this distinction might have been clarified, the discussion had already progressed to the philosophical proposition that open source equals amateurism.
Which will undoubtedly come as surprising news to most of the internet, which actually runs on open-source software.
An Important Lesson
Technology oversight requires a particular discipline. The purpose of questioning here was not to demonstrate that the Senator understands computers, nor to ensure that the Hansard forever records that he once spoke about IT with great authority.
It was to determine whether the system is:
secure, reliable, cost-effective and properly governed.
“The most powerful tool available to a legislator is not rhetorical certainty. It is curiosity.”
The useful questions would have been simple:
What is the total cost of operating the system?
Where is the infrastructure hosted?
What security safeguards protect payment data?
What audit controls exist?
Those questions illuminate reality.
Questions about whether software runs on hardware revisit problems the computing world resolved sometime in the 20th century.
Final Reflection
There is an unwritten rule in technical discussions. Those who genuinely understand complex systems rarely begin by announcing:
“I understand that space.”
They simply ask precise questions.
And within a few minutes, everyone in the room realises that they do.
In this case, the irony is that the Chief Officer appeared to understand the system perfectly well.
The only system he could not control that day was the political operating system running the Senate.
And unlike Linux, that system appears to have very limited open-source contributions… and an unusually enthusiastic interrupt function.
About the author:
Ali AwDoll is a Communication and Public Relations Expert specializing in strategic communication, storytelling, and media relations.