Anti-sleaze war a potent weapon in global relations

Anti-corruption is the newest war of nations where Kenya – and Africa – has already lost all the battles of perception, and is tipped to lose the war.

It has reached a point where a leader or lobby in New York or Brussels says Africa is stinking and the continent holds a summit to debate why they are stinking ending with a blueprint on freshness.

In many respects, global anti-corruption today carries the eerie echoes of medieval wars against witchcraft that took the form of a search for witches or evidence of witchery, often involved moral panic and a degree of mass hysteria, and which was legally sanctioned and involved official witchcraft trials till the mid-18th century – but denigrated in our modern moment as “witch-hunting”.

The world then believed that there were witches, as we know today for a fact that there are throngs of corrupt men and women in Kenya – now ranked above130 out of 192 world nations, including by the latest (2013).

But the war on witches, like our war on corruption today, was like a messy surgery with a crude axe that left communities, regions or whole societies with a deep sense of collective guilt.

Anti-corruption has become increasingly internationalised everywhere, framing Africa’s global relations and image.

In a word, the war on corruption is morphing into the most potent issue in international relations in the complex multi-polar politics of our times.

The war on corruption is as old as the hills. But it has taken a whole new dimension in the post-Cold War era. It is inextricably linked to the transformation of capitalism and class formation in the former colonial dependencies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, fuelled by globalisation, the resurgence of Russia and the emergence of economic powers in the non-Western sphere, particularly China, Brazil and India.

This geopolitical shift has inexorably given birth to a new class of indigenous capitalists in contemporary Africa.

It would be unwise and perhaps too soon to be celebrating the demise of dependency capitalism that has shaped the nature of African economies and societies.

But in the last one decade, Africa’s new capitalist knights, shored up by an “Africa Rising” (an average economic growth of over six per cent) and now owning banks and cross-border investments and businesses, are daring to dream, challenging neo-colonialism and expanding the frontiers of economic freedom.

But this cadre now faces a new mortal threat in the form of a manifestly ideological anti-corruption war, now poised to criminalise their wealth and nations.

DIVIDING THE WORLD

The ideological battle-lines are clearly marked. Conceptually, anti-corruption divides the world into two discernible moral and geo-political spheres: a largely “corruption-free” sphere covering much of North America, Europe and the Australia/New Zealand belt, and the abode of “corruption” in Africa, Asia, South America and parts of Eastern Europe.

In many foreign policies of Western governments, anti-corruption has almost displaced human rights as the pivot of “liberal internationalism”, the foreign policy doctrine that sanctions intervention in sovereign states to promote liberal values that now defines the relations of the West and the rest.

Anti-corruption is now effectively in the pantheon of “universal values”, deepening the roots of cultural imperialism that Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American public intellectual, exposed in his classic Orientalism.

In Kenya, anti-corruption is gradually replacing “international crimes” that drew the International Criminal Court orthodoxy into Eastern Africa’s pivotal state some five years ago.

The anti-sleaze war is giving a new toehold to foreign envoys in Nairobi. Some 17 Western Nairobi-based ambassadors, along with the local International Monetary Fund (IMF) director, declared in April that “corruption is undermining Kenya’s future”.

Breathing life into rogue diplomacy is a new wave of public claims of widespread corruption involving the police who allegedly receive bribes and let Al-Qaeda and its proxies free and the return of the Anglo-Leasing scam to haunt the country.

Kenya is paying the price for the failure by its power elite to mount a reasoned moral rebuttal against the new “corruption imperialism” like its Asian and Latin American counterparts.

And in their failure they are putting the whole nation at the dire risk of moral ridicule.

Take, for instance, Michela Wrong’s shockingly horrid article: “Everyone is Corrupt in Kenya, Even Grandmothers”, that appeared in Foreign Policy (May 7, 2014).

One would be terribly wrong to assume that Michela Wrong is just another journalist and author of non-fiction books, including John Githongo’s memoir, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower; she is well wired into the British aid orthodoxy.

Michela Wrong’s article epitomises the collective and oftentimes radicalised approach of international anti-corruption warriors. It reminds one of Chinua Achebe’s novel, No Longer at Ease, where a character, Mr Green, patronisingly describes Nigeria as “corrupt through and through” and the Nigerian as “mentally sapped” by the African sun.

In this “racialised” discourse, it is not just the African body and mind that are criminal, but also the African persona has, tragically, lost the soul.

Corruption in Africa is benefiting Western economies in ways sardonically reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s famous quip about “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

When Kenya pays the Sh1.4 billion – if it does pay – now claimed by companies in the West, it will not only have opened the floodgates for more suits and perhaps more colossal payments for “ghost” services, it will also have introduced a new legal avenue for illicit financial transfers.

Non-choices have consequences, too! Kenya’s partners in the West are invoking corruption to periodically suspend aid on corruption grounds in a classic “collective punishment” style, often redirecting huge chunks of “aid to Kenya” to anti-corruption/governance lobbies and activists.

Future generations will judge Jubilee harshly for perilously sleeping through a revolution, and perhaps losing the nation.

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute. [email protected]