Mea culpa. This is a Latin phrase meaning “through my fault” and is an acknowledgement of having done wrong.
It is an admission of having made a mistake that ought to have been avoided. Its origin is a Catholic prayer of confession of sinfulness called the Confiteor. It is used in the Roman Rite at the beginning of the Mass, or when receiving the sacrament of Penance.
We are sorry. This week the nation had a mea culpa moment from a very unlikely source, the matatu industry. The chairman of the Federation of Public Transport Operators apologised to Kenyans for inconveniencing them during the nationwide strike on Monday, which was called to resist the enforcement timing of road safety and courtesy rules. Never in a million years did Kenyans expect to hear those words from the matatu industry. But we did. And not only did they apologise, but also committed to comply with the rule of law.
So bizarre was the apology to commuters that it made headline news in local dailies. Yet ordinarily, in a free market economy, mea culpa is standard business practice. Firms apologise, for example, when a computer glitch double charges a customer; when a trainee waiter mixes up a restaurant order; or when a package is mangled during shipment. The common denominator these situations have is that the consumer is left unfulfilled with the value received for the money they paid. And therefore, to restore or preserve the relationship the enterprise has with the consumer, they apologise. An apology is not a confession of culpability. It is a statement of compassion. It lets the consumer know that you regret their dissatisfaction with your product or service. It helps to defuse the situation and restore their loyalty. The Harvard Business Review reports that acquiring a new customer is 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. This is simply because the customer is king. In economic-speak, this is known as consumer sovereignty.
Consumer sovereignty means consumers influence production decisions. They exercise a daily plebiscite where every shilling they spend, is a vote on the goods and services they choose to consume, and this necessitates firms to respond to their preferences and produce only those goods and services demanded, and at the quantity and quality that consumers dictate. They are the actual bosses in a free market economy. Their decisions to buy or abstain from buying determines who will own the enterprises or firms. The attitude with which they are treated dictate either profit or loss for the enterprise. Consumers have the power to make poor men rich and rich men poor. And they have no loyalty. As soon as another firm offers a cheaper, more efficient alternative, they desert their old purveyors. And that is why apologies and even compensation is the norm rather than the exception, because the customer is king.
Regrettably, as consumers of matatu services, we have abdicated our sovereignty and reversed the free market roles. And because nature abhors a vacuum, matatu operators and the mobs aka cartels and traffic officers that have perfected the art of extortion, have usurped our sovereignty. They have become the king. Subsequently, they dictate to us the quality of services they offer; they treat us with such disdain once we board their contraptions; they abuse us when we request them to lower the music volume, to slow down, not to pack the vehicle with more humans; or when we pay with high denomination notes. They arbitrarily terminate their services and forcefully eject us simply because they encounter a crowd needing to be transported in the opposite direction. Their business ethics goes against the grain of any free enterprise principles. And resultantly, other natural laws to normalise it are rendered ineffective. Is it a wonder then that this industry has become manic?
I submit that we, the consumers, have nurtured this anarchic industry. There is an apt saying for this – ngoma ínanaga ní guthínjirúo. Loosely translated, this means the devil demands more blood every time because of our willingness to incessantly sacrifice to him.
We do not need Interior CS Fred Matiang’i or the law enforcement to restore order in the matatu industry. That power is latently lying with us. We should collectively refuse to board matatus that will not treat us with the respect we deserve; that are already carrying the maximum allowable capacity; that are dirty and appear unroadworthy. We should disembark en masse when they start driving dangerously; when they overcharge; when they abuse and mishandle one of us.
Let us awaken to the fallacy of their illusory superiority and recognise that there are more of us than there are of them. So, to survive, the industry will have no choice but to swiftly conform to our preferences. And just like that, we will have reasserted our sovereignty; we will have reclaimed our kingly positions; we will have regained our role as their masters.
But this can only happen if we collectively discard our selfishness and stand in solidarity as a plebiscite to quality service; if we become better at time management so that we are not tempted to board the first matatu available; if we cherish our self-worth enough to want to be treated with dignity; if we value our hard earned money enough to want to receive the best quality of service; if we are tired of the unnecessary regular road fatalities; and when we appreciate that we have choices; and that we have the collective power to either make the matatu owners rich or poor; and create employment to the tout and his driver.
My unsolicited advice to Cabinet Secretaries Matiang’i and James Macharia (Transport) is that scarcity creates value. The scarcity principle is an economic theory in which a limited supply of a good, coupled with its high demand, results in a mismatch between the desired supply and demand equilibrium. And in natural submission to the pricing theory, the price for a scarce good or service rises until an equilibrium is reached between supply and demand. Therefore, it is farcical to arrest the matatu entrepreneurs who were simply heeding to the economic forces of this scarcity principle.
We think we are the consumers, but we are the consumed – Bryant McGill