No money is ever lost in Kenya’s overblown graft scandals

Losing money in government is not as easy as some people want to make it to appear.

Money is not like a child to go wandering about with a lost look on its forlorn, mucus-streaked face, unable to find its way home.

It is not as if Kenya puts money in its back pocket and it slips off into the coast of Somalia to be picked up by stateless persons.

When the government pays money into someone’s bank account, it knows the account holder, her home address, telephone number and tax details.

There are rules requiring banks to know their customers now.

It is not as if the money in question was caught up in a storm and floated on the wind into the Indian Ocean, or sneaked across the border into Uganda.

Visiting heads of state have not been leaving State House with sacks of cash.

With all the innovation in the Integrated Financial Management System, internal checks and controls, accountants and auditors, there is no way money can leave Treasury and end up somewhere it was not meant to be.

Yet, no one wants to believe government officials when they repeatedly state that no money has been lost at the Ministry of Health, that any theft that might have occurred at the National Youth Service was stopped before payments were made, and that the proceeds from the sovereign bond issued in Europe have been spent to making life better here at home.

When there are genuine mistakes in overpayment, as happened in the case of a renowned Twitter professor who received an undeserved Sh12 million from NYS, it is promptly returned within the year.

Everybody knows that language is not the strongest suit for people who work with numbers.

The limited English vocabulary of accountants and auditors forces them to characterise normal expenditure as loss.

All the money paid to suppliers and service providers is out there doing business, constructing houses, getting back into the left pocket of the government as tax on car imports, land tax, value added tax, legal fees and dandruff charges at the salon.

Even the World Bank acknowledges that Kenya’s economic growth is 5.9 per cent, a feat that could not be achieved if the country was losing that much money through corruption.

POLITICAL FOOTBALL
People should stop getting excited about small money like Sh1.8 billion being paid out to legitimate businesses from the National Youth Service, or even the Sh5.3 billion being paid out to companies by the Ministry of Health.

The two sums combined are a mere 0.36 per cent the country’s Sh2 trillion — three decimal points of the money being spent in Kenya.

It would be a mistake to be distracted by the crumbs when the loaf is still whole.

Even if you threw in the entire Sh250 billion received from the Eurobond sale, and gave it away, the total hardly makes up 13 per cent of the budget.

Every case of bad accounting, misreading of the books and sheer political mischief snowballs into a scandal.

No one knows this better than President Uhuru Kenyatta, who made a name for himself crying wolf over the Sh53 billion security contracts involving Anglo Leasing and Finance Company when he was the leader of the Official Opposition.

Despite being told that no money had been lost, he insisted on shouting from the rooftops about scandal.

As soon as he settled on the presidential chair, he ordered everybody to wire Sh1.4 billion to Anglo Leasing.

All the corruption talk is a case of political football, with the opposition and its lackeys in newsrooms badmouthing the country and celebrating when Kenya gets a bad rap as a hotbed of terror, a den of corruption, a bastion of impunity.

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