Kenya is reaching its limits, let's not break its fragile back

What you need to know:

  • Whether his proclaimed intentions to fight corruption are real or not, the President should heed one of Soyinka’s most quoted pieces of advice, that "A tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigritude, it pounces."

  • The President and his government should therefore stop with the threats that he is a tiger and simply pounce on the corrupt, and save Kenya from reaching its elastic limit and getting deformed, forever.

In high school physics, one of the areas of study was the elasticity of materials, and therein lay a concept called elastic limit. This upper threshold meant a material had stretched as far as it could, and therefore couldn’t and wouldn’t stretch any further without its size or shape being permanently deformed.

DEFORMED

By all means, Kenya is reaching its elastic limit as regards the plunder of its resources. And whether the purge on corruption will succeed or not, there is an unfortunately growing likelihood that the damage the perpetual corruption scandals are doing to the Kenyan economy and to its national psyche may leave the country permanently deformed, never able to recover its sense of innocence and agility.

For the last many months, news of mega government corruption scandals have reached a crescendo, literary choking the country’s airwaves. As a result, the country’s populace is feeling suffocated in all ways imaginable — physically, psychologically, and even spiritually — left with nowhere to turn and nothing to hold onto. It feels like the country is on free fall, fast drowning with no straw to clutch onto.

The more this outrageous theft of state funds is discovered, the more a dark blanket of hopelessness and despair keeps spreading over Kenya, entrenching palpable gloom and mental numbness, followed by a sense of collective national apathy, a surrender of sorts. Eventually, Kenyans will morph into a bunch of angry and hungry zombies, a dangerous state of affairs since once such a beaten down citizenry decides to rise up, there will be no guarantees that there will be a country left to govern thereafter.

SCANDALS

This sense of national fatigue and collective depression was in fact articulated on Thursday by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who in a surprise twist of events warned that if no satisfactorily punitive action is taken and seen to be taken against the corrupt — partially blaming the Judiciary for offering lenient bail terms to the accused — then the citizenry would resort to taking the law into their own hands.

Even if one understood what the President meant, that he too was in agreement that something urgent and drastic must be done in the fight against corruption — more than what is already being done, especially by the Judiciary, lest the country fall into a state of complete anarchy — it was quite difficult to understand whether the President was in effect inciting the public into taking action against corrupt state officials, and if that were the case, what exactly this sort of action would be.

If the President was in fact calling the citizenry to rise up in arms, what does this say about his ability and that of his government to govern? Was he, by extension, donating back to the people his mandate to govern? These are all questions that will linger in many minds, much as the President reiterates his commitment to fighting corruption. Does he only have the will, or does he also have a viable way?

To make sense of this absurd obtaining state of affairs, creative Kenyans have since made a collage of newspaper headlines reporting on a series of recent multibillion corruption scandals, putting into proper context the fact that it has become near impossible to keep track of corruption scandals, leave alone have the head space to wrap one’s mind around the humongous figures involved.

It is as if we are in the middle of a billion dollar nightmare, only that this is not a dream.

LEADERSHIP

As a result, there are those who, using stereotypical lenses, have wondered whether Kenya has become more corrupt than Nigeria. But as we lack a language to speak about our own predicament, maybe it’s advisable that we look to Nigeria. In 1983, as his country wallowed under a heavy yoke of corruption and authoritarianism, Chinua Achebe wrote a book entitled ‘‘The Trouble with Nigeria,’’ in which after a long prognosis, his diagnosed was that his country’s problem was simply and squarely leadership.

In fact, Achebe’s contemporary, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, put it even more succinctly.

‘‘We asked for leaders,’’ Soyinka said, ‘‘but we were sent for executioners.’’

Therefore, as we debate our ranking in the list of the most corrupt nations, let it not be lost on us, and to the President, that like Nigeria, in the final analysis, Kenya’s problem will be diagnosed as leadership, a leadership which has directly or indirectly aided and abetted corruption since independence.

Whether his proclaimed intentions to fight corruption are real or not, the President should heed one of Soyinka’s most quoted pieces of advice, that "A tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigritude, it pounces." The President and his government should therefore stop with the threats that he is a tiger and simply pounce on the corrupt, and save Kenya from reaching its elastic limit and getting deformed, forever.