Where the presidential boot should be planted

If I were President Mwai Kibaki and woke up in a murderous mood, (okay, feeling like planting a boot on some Cabinet minister) I would not look very far. I would promptly go for Prof Sam Ongeri.

Breathing fire and brimstone, I would summon the fellow to the big house on the hill and ask him to explain his rather tragic insistence that there was never a financial scandal in the Ministry of Education; that the whole stink was the imagination of dirty minded journalists.

I would seek to know whether he has an attitude problem. Why? Because I recently had to suspend a permanent secretary in the wake of a scandal in this man’s ministry.

Of course he would blurt out some sort of double political speak after which the boot would be firmly planted on his butt.

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Corrupt politicians are going for each other’s throats, and it can only be good when the bad guys tear into each other. The talk in town is that elaborate lists of who stole what, where and when are stashed somewhere in their secretariats ready for deployment on a short notice.

The unwritten rule of engagement they are trying to write is: yap about our eating chiefs and we will sing about yours even louder.

Now this balance of terror might get the architects of grand theft thinking twice before stealing something even bigger. They might even stop it altogether.

However, there is a frightening ring to it.

Sad will be the day when these people realise that exposing each other is no good for their eating habits. They must never be allowed to speak in one voice.

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Assuming that waheshimiwas are in a shape to do anything after back-breaking and possibly country-breaking power games, I will ask them to do Kenyans a big favour.

I know they cannot make any alteration whatsoever to the draft constitution outside Parliament but they will be doubly useful to this Republic if they ensure that the constitution criminalises all forms of brokerage.

They could start with what happens at Nairobi’s Wakulima and Mombasa’s Mwembe Tayari markets.

You will have to be bananas to try to sell your bananas there to retailers without surrendering them to unsavoury characters called brokers. The brokers (my foot!) sell them to retailers and pay you what they like.

In the same vein, you wouldn’t pick up goods for transport on our major highways without reckoning with ‘brokers.’ But this is a common cold. The cancer resides in public procurement as is evident in the City Council of Nairobi’s Grave Matter.

Exercising sovereign will of Kenyans and being doubly capable of negotiating the most complex of all business transactions under the sun and in the outer space, the Republic of Kenya hereby criminalises all forms of brokerage.

It is very important that this clause is sneaked into the constitutional draft.

swambua@nation.co.ke