Kenya’s corruption war; the problem is as much the ‘eating’ as the how

What you need to know:

  • Though many have sniggered at the move as mostly symbolic, and most of the people on the list will be cleared and back in government and back to their old ways, clearly the public appetite for some corruption blood is high.
  • All over Africa, we have come to the view that corruption in politics is primarily driven by electoral politics; political ministers collect bribes and steal public funds to pay off the debts of the last election, build a war chest for the next contest, and to keep their constituents happy, all things they cannot do from their salaries.
  • If the SGR was nearing Malaba at the border with Uganda and there were photographs of villagers along its path dancing and celebrating its arrival, there would be a different conversation around it.

You never see these things coming. President Uhuru Kenyatta goes to Parliament to make a regular State of the Nation address, and indeed it starts as such. Then he drops the hammer, and asks government officials being investigated for corruption to step aside.

Matters would have ended there, and they have done in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa in the past. However, he then released the now famous “List of Shame”, as Kenyans on Twitter quickly dubbed it, and the dominoes starting falling.

So far, five members of his Cabinet have had to do the side dance. Though many have sniggered at the move as mostly symbolic, and most of the people on the list will be cleared and back in government and back to their old ways, clearly the public appetite for some corruption blood is high.

Many people are excited and happy that the President did what he did. The List of Shame should, however, trouble us for bigger reasons. The Kenyatta Cabinet is technocratic, and one of the things the country’s new Constitution sought to achieve by providing for a Cabinet of unelected politicians was to eliminate corruption and improve efficiency.

ELECTORAL POLITICS

All over Africa, we have come to the view that corruption in politics is primarily driven by electoral politics; political ministers collect bribes and steal public funds to pay off the debts of the last election, build a war chest for the next contest, and to keep their constituents happy, all things they cannot do from their salaries.

Secondly, civil servants, fearing they will be sacked or demoted with the change of government at election, steal as a way of fast-forwarding their terminal benefits. However, we have seen that Cabinet secretaries, who have no constituencies to nurse, are on the List of Shame.

Some, if not all, might be cleared, but the fact that the majority of Cabinet secretaries are not on the list means it was possible to avoid it.

A technocratic Cabinet was a structural reform to avoid the situation that Kenya is in — of serious progress against corruption happening only if the president as an individual stepped into the fight.

So what else is left? My sense is that the outrage about corruption is not just over the “eating”. Rather it is about outcomes. If, for example, the technology that the Interim Independent Electoral Commission bought for the 2013 polls had not failed so dismally, and had instead worked flawlessly, there would not have been so much anger at its cost, or at the commission.

LIKE WAR

Secondly, too many times, public officials fail to understand that corruption is like war. You need to take contested territory, and then occupy it effectively. Thus, in the case of the standard gauge railway (SGR), the arguments against it and the queries about its cost have raced far ahead of the project.

When Mwai Kibaki was president, in his last years he seemed to have appreciated this point. He just did not stand around fondling his golf clubs. By the time most people woke up to the scale of the Thika Road project, it was nearly half-done. From that point the critics of the design and cost of the Thika highway were playing rearguard action. Which goes back to our first point; that this would not have been done if all the Thika Road money had been chewed. In other words, you have to lay down a marker.

If the SGR was nearing Malaba at the border with Uganda and there were photographs of villagers along its path dancing and celebrating its arrival, there would be a different conversation around it.
Which leads us to our final point: People rail against corruption most when they are getting nothing and living through hard economic times and then see big men living large on their taxes. If the economy is growing and the benefits are been distributed fairly, there is less gripe about corruption.

EVIL BONUS

It would seem, then, that the people see corruption as an “evil bonus”. The smaller people hate it more when the CEOs cut big cheques for themselves when the company is doing poorly and when they are getting a pittance or nothing.

In other words, you have to earn your corrupt wage. Rather than trying to fill the State with angels, the more practical thing seems to have a competent government that delivers on projects, grows the economy, and divides the cake even-handedly.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3