We need to get past the pain and shame of frequent, untidy inheritance disputes

Do Kenyans suffer from the vanity of thinking that they will live forever or is there some other compelling reason why even the most senior and educated among our folk are averse to making wills? Is it cultural?

A lawyer who has been in private practice for 30 years told me he has written an insignificant number of wills for Africans compared with those he writes for Kenyans of European and Indian extraction.

And yet, in the latter communities, the makers of the wills are invariably from monogamous unions, which create fewer succession problems compared to the polygamous set-ups that we Africans stumble into.

If recent media reports are anything to go by, there are now too many instances of high-ranking public servants and city fathers who accumulated sizeable estates over the years dying before tidying up their homes. Why?

Not all of our ethnic traditions tip-toe around the reality of death and inheritance. Elaborate rituals and structures exist(ed) in many of them to facilitate orderly distribution of one’s estate to one’s heirs.

There is then, a seeming failure to link old ways with new laws, and the first generation of Western-educated Africans have fallen prey to the attendant hiatus — unwilling to practise old ethnic mores and unable to fully embrace new legal provisions.

PUBLIC SPECTACLE

The spectacle of indecent burials and families of high-ranking Kenyans brawling all over the media in inheritance disputes tarnishes the memory of illustrious careers.

These are people the country entrusted with the management of critical institutions. Upon death, it emerges that their capacity for managing human relations was, actually, fairly dim.
We have seen chief government legal advisors, who oversaw the Office of the Public Trustee where many intestate estates end up, die without wills.

Our highest-ranking security chiefs set their own homes aflame with all manner of dangerous outcomes by failing to stipulate provisions for a motley crew of undocumented “wives” and supplementary offspring. Alas, their secretive approach was not limited to their workplace; it extended into their social habits.

Bigwigs in the Provincial Administration have ended up detained in mortuaries for months on end as rivalling parties fight to own their graves and their fortunes. These fights demonstrate how poor the dead man was at administering to the primary unit of management — his family.

Our penchant for irony is so pervasive that even lawyers and judges who earn a living by crafting long-winded documents and arguments to either manage or overcome all manner of domestic and commercial disputes, neglect to write their own wills.

In one instance, such neglect opened up five months of courtroom drama over the culturally correct burial place for the lawyer in question. It was a dissonant drama that pitted the man’s relatives up against his widow, giving inter-ethnic marriages a bad name.

It is tempting to argue that what we have been seeing in public succession wars is the curse of wealth. But that would be a cynical conclusion. What we are suffering under is the curse of selfish, short-sighted patriarchy, miserably caught between traditions. It afflicts peasants just as much as the rich.

Not all of our seniors are selfish and insecure. One has only to read the engaging study of Kenyan businessmen, Profiles of Kenyan Entrepreneurs, to confirm that it is possible to plan for how wealth will be passed on and multiplied, rather than being scattered in elastic processes that only benefit lawyers and allied intermediaries in already congested courts.

Those who believe that laws can fix culture might want to craft a requirement that the colourful public vetting that has become a pre-requisite for securing high-level public office should include the intrusive question:

“Do you have a written will?”

The answer to that question would reveal volumes about the applicant’s strategic and succession planning skills. But it is a dangerous question whose answer can easily open one up to crafty stalking by dodgy relatives.

Ultimately, re-engineering shifty, apprehensive patriarchs is a long-term socio-cultural project that cannot be fixed solely by laws of succession.

Something far more nuanced needs to be done within families to engender inclusivity from visionary men, committed women and conscientious children.