Your Excellency !
Memo to a new Governor Part II
My New Governor,
I have given you time to review my first letter and also to get sworn in. I trust you have read it. If not, you can still read it here. I suppose by now that you are planning your cabinet and planning for how you will fulfill all the expectation we discussed.
The real expectation that matters, is what you dreamt of when you took the the decision to jump into the fray. And become governor. That driving force that you repeated to yourself at each obstacle and at each betrayal. Let me suppose that your motivation is power, legacy and riches in that order. It usually is. Power to direct the lives of millions and ride roughshod over them if need be, the chance to be king. Also the power to create a dynasty and to create an ElDorado with continuous adulation of citizens. Legacy because you have term limits and you do not want your power to diminish because your term has ended. If possible , you will want to be king even in death. As the rulers of NK are preserved and worshipped. You will want to live on in the actions and programmes of your successors. Of course your legacy has to expand beyond the immediate boundaries of your small state. What’s better than being recognized nationally and globally? And riches of course because then it will be worth it. I know that this is what is in your heart of hearts. Of course you must never say it to anyone. To all others you are the crusader for justice, the anti-corruption fighter, the economic messiah. The righter of age old wrongs. And you will be all of those because achieving all three of your hearts desire depends on it.
As you would have found out during the campaign , in politics and in power friends and loyalty are the hardest commodities to find. However for you to start your journey to power, legacy and riches, you need a cult of true believers in you and in your quest for power, legacy and riches. At this beginning, you need a small cult that you can use to create a movement. You need your intellectual who will provide the intellectual basis for what you are about to do. You need your enforcer who is willing to do the dirty jobs on your behalf and also on behalf of your mission. And you need your rabble rouser to help you create and maintain the myth of your charisma and sainthood. Rounding up your innermost cult of believers is a discrete manager of riches who will help keep the riches for you, keep riches for the cult and ensure there is some left to ensure you get power and legacy. And of course you need the Uber administrator who can ensure the apparatus of the state is revving and purring along no matter what. Don’t forget the spiritual director of the cult who will manage the spiritual direction. You cannot run this thing by yourself only and you need a tight cult that believes, that have your back and also your front. As we see later, you must start with a core group that you trust implicitly because establishing your power, legacy and riches will require some tough and nasty things to be done. Give them titles and positions or don’t but have them handy and ready to step in and initiate or clean the mess as required.
The first thing you need in order to be able to exercise the kind of control that will assure your power, legacy and riches is that you need to know what is going on, who is where, who has done or is doing what, who is thinking of what. You have to use that knowledge to stay one step ahead of your detractors, to stay one step further in the good books of your electorate and to create a myth of omniscience. You need information. About everyone and everything that is happening in your domain. In the old times , you will need to establish an army of spies or encourage people to spy on each other. You don’t need that as much but if you really want to create a cult of true believers, then your first group of true believers are your spies. Spying has a way of making you believe you are part of a special group especially when the spying is not overtly paid for but rewarded with secret access and discrete favors. So you must definitely build your own spying network. And have a spy chief who keeps a tab on the thoughts and rumors and actions of every one. Be sure to have an arch believer as your spy chief because he will also be spying on you. Know for certain that your spying will not just be on your subject but also across the full spectrum of stakeholders, challengers, partners and regulators within and without.
In this day and age however, you need more than a spy masters tale though. You need data that you can use computers to process and provide projections for where your state is and where it is going. You need a fully digital data bureau and a digital chief data officer. This bureau will collect granular data about who does what, who owns what, which transactions happened, who participated in that transaction, what assets were exchanged. Ostensibly , your objective for this is to be able to plan , which is true. You also need this data to be able to measure the effectiveness of your policies. If you don’t know the location of every pothole, how will you know if your works ministry is filling the pot holes? If you don’t know which road will have the most economic or social benefit, how do you decide which roads to be built? If you don’t know how many hours are lost in traffic how do you get to prioritize reducing traffic. If you are not tracking the sentiment of citizens on social media, how do you adjust policies to reduce discontent? With the newest technologies, you can recognize those most likely to commit crime or lead demonstrations by just aggregating the data of what they do, what they say, what they like and what they don’t like, where they go and where they don’t ago, even what they look like. Even Moses ordered that the people be counted. And so did Caesar. You see, you will soon find out that you don’t have any idea where the assets of your government are and in what state they are including cash. You will find out that you have no clue what the transportation network is, you don’t know what your people are suffering and you also don’t know if your actions and non actions are having any impact. You will discover that without information, without data and without deep insights, you will be essentially running totally blind. You will be the proverbial king walking naked down the street and of course no one will tell you that you are stark naked.
To realize your dreams of power, legacy and riches ; you will lay the foundation on a core set of believers in your long term mission supported by a massive surveillance operation. Be prepared of course because whenever people realise the full scale of your surveillance operation, there will be a large hue and cry but then you will know who will lead the outcry and your table rouser will be able to convince everyone that it is in every one’s interest. Now that you have a team ready to die with you and a way to keep a hand on the pulse of your state, it is time to progress to the next stage.
I will wait for you to create this structures and then we can discuss how to go about cementing your power, your legacy and riches.
