Why technology has failed to curb corruption

It is obvious that corruption in Kenya has reached epidemic levels. Reports from the auditor-general, parliamentary committees and anti-corruption agencies, among others, confirm that as a country, we have entered new territory as far as corruption practices are concerned.

Which is quite ironic considering that our level of automation both in government and in the private sector has improved significantly over the last few years.

One would have thought that increased automation would lead to reduced levels of corruption given the reduced level of personal contact necessary to access public service.

The government has successfully moved most of the bribery-prone services online through its e-Citizen portal. Whereas there exists sections of the process that are still manual, 90 per cent of the tasks are completed online with minimal human interaction.

We should therefore be registering and celebrating lower incidences of corruption in government given this level of automation. Instead, we seem to experience a sudden jump in corruption related incidences and have become the global case study for inventing new corruption techniques.

EXPLOITING TECHNOLOGY FOR ILL

Whereas technology has never been the single silver bullet cure for corruption, it has successfully contributed towards mitigating and slowing down corrupt tendencies in other economies.

So why has technology performed dismally against corruption in Kenya?

Kenya, home to the visionary silicon savannah, source of the legendary M-Pesa phenomenon and led by the self-declared, digital government, should actually be doing better when it comes to technology-led fight against corruption. Instead, we have completely failed to leverage technology in the fight against corruption.

In fact, using technology, government officials have discovered a new and faster platform for siphoning billions of shillings from the public coffers. Even where the electronic systems have left digital footprints of who did what and when, the culprits are often hauled in courts for PR rather than prosecution purposes.

After getting some snapshots of some high-ranking officials in the dock, nobody really cares to know if any prosecutions or convictions took place. The cases are soon forgotten, as the nation awaits anxiously for the next bigger and juicier corruption scandal.

COMPROMISED SYSTEMS

A compromised investigative, prosecutorial or judicial system is therefore one aspect that renders the fight against corruption ineffective. The political elites know this very well and some are on record for insinuating that they have enough money to ‘sort’ out either the prosecutors or the judges in the event that someone attempted to haul them to the courts of law.

Additionally, the government bureaucratic system is by design inherently predisposed towards being corrupt. This is particularly true when it comes to public appointments to senior positions in government.

Cabinet secretaries, principal secretaries, commissioners, security bosses, parastatal directors amongst others are many a times selected based on who is considered more open to facilitating the gravy train, rather than who is likely to stop the financial bleeding.

Once appointed, they are more often reminded in no subtle ways that their role goes beyond mere public service; it includes addressing the ‘our time to eat syndrome’. Essentially the message is that in case you are unable to facilitate the ‘eating’, someone else who is more cooperative can easily be appointed to your privileged position.

VETTING PROCESS ABUSED

The new constitution identified this weakness by defining several governance agencies as being constitutional and ring-fencing them with security of tenure. Other appointments were required to be subjected to parliamentary vetting processes.

However, given the so-called parliamentary "tyranny of numbers", the vetting process was abused to the extent that parliament now finds itself in a contradictory situation where it is shouting the loudest about impeaching a good number of government appointees.

They have conveniently decided to forget that they are the very same group that approved the appointees barely two and a half years ago. That said, the citizens share the blame for electing a sizeable number of leaders with suspicious backgrounds and then expecting them to behave like angels.

With such a vicious cycle of self-inflicted, dysfunctional state of affairs there is little chance of technology playing a positive and effective role in the fight against corruption.

Unless and until we upgrade our mental software to match the spirit of our new constitution, technology will continue to perform miserably against corruption.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. [email protected], @jwalu