New bank notes: Why is it so hard for us to follow the law?
What you need to know:
Why must they ensure that their most important actions border on illegalities and create unnecessary controversy even where we should be celebrating progress?
Is it possible that nobody thought that the faces on the new notes would raise a furore, at least in some parts of our society?
Why did they not just use images that are as far from controversy as possible?
After a long-winded process that was set in motion by the promulgation of our Constitution in 2010, the Central Bank finally released new bank notes with new design features, including addressing the needs of visually impaired Kenyans.
CONTROVERSY
Many Kenyans were excited by the announcement, which marks a key milestone in our history, and the expectation was that the main reason our currency needed replacement was conclusively addressed -- the constitutional prohibition against having people’s faces on our money.
The government even added a twist to the whole launch of currency by demonetising the largest denomination note, the one thousand shillings note, with effect from October this year. This was intended to control the money in circulation and combat fraud and theft that has traditionally targeted this denomination. Many considered this move to be particularly inspired in a country where politicians and other big shots are thought to keep huge stashes of cash in their homes for purposes of purchasing influence or power.
Unfortunately, upon closer scrutiny of the new notes, it became clear that some of the denominations still contained images of known persons. The largest note has the image of the first President of Kenya, while another one has what looks like the image of an identifiable government official. As expected, there have been debates about what those images mean, and if they run afoul of the constitutional prohibition of having people’s portraits on our currency. Some people have gone to court to challenge the legitimacy of the new notes, while others have contrived all sorts of arguments to justify having the faces on our currency.
The main question arising from this interesting behaviour is: Why is it so hard for our leaders to follow the law? Why must they ensure that their most important actions border on illegalities and create unnecessary controversy even where we should be celebrating progress? Is it possible that nobody thought that the faces on the new notes would raise a furore, at least in some parts of our society? Why did they not just use images that are as far from controversy as possible?
IMPUNITY
The argument that government officials involved in designing the new currency were ignorant of the controversy they would cause is weak and largely improbable. Given the level of scrutiny by all sorts of ‘experts’ before the currency was approved and released, it is unlikely that the matter never came up for discussion at any point in the process.
That being the case, it follows therefore that something else is responsible for this borderline assault on the Constitution and the law. Anyone who has been studying this country since independence will recognise the ugly monster responsible for this act of potential sabotage – the monster called impunity. Someone probably decided to include the faces knowing that we will make noise for a few days and then move on to more ‘important’ stuff, the Constitution be damned. After all there is a culture of helplessness in the common mwananchi which counsels that ‘you cannot fight the government’ any time something controversial happens.
The images on our currency are only the latest attempts to defeat the Constitution over the past decade of its existence. Should they prevail, we must expect more large-scale impunity, eventually leading to the overthrow of the Constitution and the triumph of the kleptocrats.
The writer is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]
