Let corruption not rob us of the freedom Mau Mau fought for

My return to reporting corruption these past two months has left me deeply disturbed about the state of our country and the character of some Kenyans.

In 1952 or thereabout, young people from various parts of the country took up pangas against the most powerful empire on earth at the time. The question of why they did such a foolhardy thing has been answered, mainly by people who were collaborating: They were fighting for freedom and land.

But what does that mean? What does fighting for freedom mean?

REVULSION

My father was always cagey about the deeper motivation for quitting the kitchen where he worked as a “boy” and taking up arms. There was talk of taking your hat off to white children, not being able to cross what is now Moi Avenue if you were black and all that, but was that enough?

I think African men got to the point of “we can’t live like this anymore”. The revulsion and anger of being treated like filth built up to a point where the very point of being alive was lost.

Struggles are expensive

My recent experiences convince me that, in a different way, we have reached that point again.

HANGMAN

The lesson from the 1950s is that struggles are expensive.

In prison, those brave freedom fighters who survived the hangman were in the hands of folks who almost considered it their birthright to break our people: The brutal beatings, the killings, the torture, the hard labour, the hostile climate …

(One day I drove up to the gate of Manyani Prison and said I wanted to see the place where my father served part of his seven years in prison. They politely asked me to get lost.)

The loneliness of being separated from your young bride and child who, left on their own in a country at war, had to fight to stay alive.

MILLIONAIRES

I think the biggest sacrifice the Mau Mau made was to suppress the furious desire to have a second civil war to take the country back from the traitors, collaborators and homeguards.

The Mau Mau lost everything. They lost the war, they suffered in prison, they lost their land, which was given to the collaborators, and their most valuable heritage — the burning patriotism and sacrifice which drove them to the forests — is lost to their children.

In the 1950s, those who just minded their own interests — those who kissed the white man’s boots and sold their countrymen down the river so that they could attend school, make money, educate their kids, get free land and well paying jobs — prospered. In the same way, those who are looting the Treasury, allowing poison to be fed to children, selling their positions like mangoes in the market … these folks are millionaires.

VENERATED

What have we ended up with? A country where opportunity is almost exclusively limited to stealing, a country which can’t protect itself because of corruption, where, if you start an industry, you are wiped out by fakes allowed in by your government, a country in which the government buys fakes from the Chinese rather than its own citizens, a country which imports everything so that ‘tenderpreneurs’ can make money, a place where you are not sure what you are feeding your children, where government projects are corruption schemes, where thieves are more powerful and more venerated than our war heroes …

A country whose future is uncertain, a people whose only value is money, however it is made, even if it is on the bodies of dead innocents.

I respect the fact that there are Kenyans who have chosen not to have values, who don’t care how many people are harmed so long as they make money. I do hope that they also respect the fact that there are those of us who believe that we just can’t live like that.

BRUTALLY GREEDY

Doing business with the government is not corruption. As a matter of fact, the government is the biggest business in town. But it has to be good, clean business where the businessman gets a reasonable, normal return and the taxpayer value for money.

Other avenues of investments must be created so that Kenyans stop inheriting corruption, from father to son, like a generational curse or a city council house. Rather than pretending that the government can build houses, how about creating the structures and incentives for individuals to do it?

Finally, is it possible for us to rediscover honesty and humanity? How can a nation be so ruthlessly and brutally greedy? Can something be done to change Kenyans from approaching life as if they are a herd of feeding hippos?

SENSE OF DUTY

There are many Kenyans, since they are so corrupted that their souls have evaporated, who do not believe that one can act out of a sense of duty. They believe that when a journalist goes to do a story, he must have been paid by someone. Or if a government official takes a decision, it must have automatically been influenced by a kickback.

We need to honour service and sacrifice, not the wives, relatives and sycophants of politicians. And we need to start putting the thieves who have been exposed and charged away for a very, very long time.

That is the choice: Turn our backs on corruption or give up our country.

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