We can’t survive as a nation if we are looted at this rate

Every day that the sun rises, our newspapers carry headlines reporting officials as having invaded and emptied our national coffers. The question sticks out like the Kilimanjaro: How can Kenya survive as a nation if we continue to allow officials to dip long fingers into all our national cash tills?

Won’t the government of the day take a single public step to plug all the loopholes through which our meagre finances are leaked out into the pockets of our own grave-diggers nationwide and to punish the culprits in a manner designed to deter potential thieves? The headline in the Nation of Friday, May 18, was typical of our country: “Exposed: Who was paid what by NYS?”

The initials “NYS” stand for “National Youth Service”. That immediately raises a frightening question. If such an ideal as a youth service is what is being used to milk Kenyans dry, where are we headed as a nation? Such was the question that, as a nation, we should have posed from day one of our very independence.

LOOTING

How can we survive — leave alone develop — when, through deliberate official inaction, we systematically abandon our country and its people in the hands of ruthless mass killers?  I say that “we” collectively allow it because it can be perpetrated only because the culprits know at least two things. One is that no official action will ever be taken against them.

The other is the public belief that certain individuals inside the official hierarchy are beneficiaries of this looting. For it immediately raises a hideous question: If our governmental system were serious about catching and punishing the perpetrators of such hideous acts, how could that kind of social ugliness go on unpunished nationwide?

If the official society were concerned enough, we would see it taking tangible actions not only to catch and punish the culprits but also to force them to return the loot to the public’s granary where it belongs.

That — to be sure — is easier said than done. Nowadays, many thieves know much better than to leave evidence in their spoors.

CRIMINALS

But to talk like that is to imply that Kenya has reached the point where no return is possible. It is to surrender the people completely into the hands of criminals. It is to throw our whole governmental ideals to bandits. It is to give up all hope of ever reaching the coasts of salvation from what we have suffered ever since Britain’s economic barons forced on us a system where official robbery is a piece of cake.

After the native Kenyans had sacrificed so much blood to defeat the European torture of our very souls even more heinously, it was a tragedy to watch the black-skinned replacements of the British step into the shoes of those foreigners to perpetrate exactly the same criminal acts against human beings of their own kind.

For surrendering our whole life to the local devil would soon prove just as painfully ruinous to the national soul as Britain’s colonial sucking of our economic blood had been for close to a century before Jomo Kenyatta and other Kenyan heroes and heroines rescued us from the jaws of a ravenous and ruthless class of Western Europeans.

YOUNGER GENERATIONS

The question, then, is this: Isn’t there any way in which Kenya can transform itself overnight in such a manner as to effectively prevent officials from dipping such ugly fingers into our collective national cash containers? Isn’t there any method by which we can deter the potential culprits among our younger generations?

Will the minister for education please tell the nation how it is that, from what we claim to be moral tuition, criminality ends up as the chief characteristic of our children?

How is it that thieves dominate our society and that, concerning criminality, Kenya is among the most notorious former European colonies?

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