Someone lit fire under EACC and renegades just don’t get it!

The chairman of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, Philip Kinisu, before the joint select committee on the body at Parliament Buildings in Nairobi on July 25, 2016. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Media reports showing Mr Kinisu’s family business had had dealings with the NYS had battered the reputation of the commission in the past two weeks.
  • The political elites and the tenderpreneurs who wanted to see the back of the anti-graft agency bosses first went for Mumo Matemu and isolated him.
  • The corruption merchants are known to get particularly ruthless when a regime is anxious about re-election.

When I read in the newspapers last Thursday how fellow commissioners and senior secretariat staff at the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) had come out to demand that chairman Philip Kinisu resign, I burst out laughing.

I should have gone ahead and remarked in Kenyan social-mediaspeak, #NiokotweIntegrityHouse (Someone pick me up from the floor of Integrity House).

For the record, I think the renegades were probably honest in their quest to force their boss out. Media reports showing Mr Kinisu’s family business had had dealings with the National Youth Service (NYS) had battered the reputation of the commission in the past two weeks.

The NYS is reportedly under active investigation by the EACC over a procurement scandal in which the taxpayers lost hundreds of millions of shillings.

Mr Kinisu has dismissed any notion of conflict of interest, arguing that he stepped down from the directorship of the company before taking over the EACC job.

But he has hardly helped matters maintaining he would cling onto his position, even as he endured the embarrassment of having to appear before detectives at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

The bigger problem, though, is that the renegades just don’t seem to get it.

 Someone lit a fire under the EACC with a spark of the Kinisu affair and there they are trying to add fuel to it!

Didn’t they learn a thing from the troubles of their predecessors at Integrity Centre?

This is exactly how it went the last time.

VOLUNTARY RESIGNATION

The political elites and the tenderpreneurs who wanted to see the back of the anti-graft agency bosses first went for Mumo Matemu and isolated him.

They then tricked his fellow commissioners into agreeing to voluntary resignation by dangling assorted incentives, including the promise of an ambassadorial posting to Brazil.

By the time the commissioners realised they had been played, it was too late. If there was anything to learn from the Matemu ouster, it was that at Integrity Centre you either stick together or get hanged separately. Perhaps the new lot knows something we don’t.

But it is difficult to see how resorting to public feuds will salvage the image of an institution that appears irredeemably damaged anyway, let alone rescue the careers of individual commissioners.

Few will be surprised when politicians begin a chorus calling for the disbandment of the EACC or someone from the Attorney-General’s office walks through the door to give the commissioners quit orders because “they have failed to put their house in order”.

And the timing is about right. Every major corruption scandal in Kenya has been linked to an election and the hunger for campaign funds. Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, Eurobond, name it.

The corruption merchants are known to get particularly ruthless when a regime is anxious about re-election.

So, with the 2017 elections only a year away, who needs a functional anti-graft agency snooping around?

[email protected]; @otienootieno