Resigned to corruption: We no longer care

I like to define culture as the basis upon which a society, a community or a group of people interpret their experience of their social and physical world and order their relationships into a coherent way of life.

Culture serves the purpose of making the world less mysterious and less frightening.

It serves the need of laying out a predictable world in which everyone is firmly grounded.

In every society, there are three types of needs that have to be satisfied. These are the basic, derived and integrative needs and culture does provide such satisfaction.

At that point, I ask myself the question: What is our Kenyan culture? When one looks at some of the stories we read, questions arise.

How would we describe our political culture? How would we describe our economic culture?

I followed with keen interest the episode regarding a parliamentary watchdog committee a week ago.

What came out were accusations and counter-accusations between members of the said committee and the intention to kick out their chairman which did not happen.

The issues in question had to do with corruption. We have heard before that our Members of Parliament are bribed to vote one way or the other.

It has also been said that those committees are not completely innocent in this regard.

The unfortunate part is that we Kenyans seem to have accepted that as our culture. We all carry on with our lives as if this does not matter.

Our members of parliament seat in the most sacred space designated for deliberations aimed at making this a greater nation and making laws that govern a sane society.

Isn’t that why we call them honourable people?

Which honourable people would even conceive the idea of being bribed so that they may allow the perpetuation of bad practices that hurt our very existence as a national society?

When this information comes out in the public sphere they just do their intrigues, exchange a few words and in no time we forget about it and life goes on.

In civilized society, people in public office usually resign when they are named as having been involved in some shady behaviour. That rarely happens in Kenya. It is not part of our culture.

The point I am making here is that I am afraid corruption has become so entrenched in the running of our institutions that many of us have internalised it as part of our way of doing things.

That is why those battles about members of parliamentary committees being bribed do not seem to bother many of us. In fact we have forgotten about that incident and gone on to other current matters.

Father Wamugunda is Dean of Students, University of Nairobi; [email protected]