Graft killing genuine business and Kenya's standing globally

Majority of Kenyans support President Uhuru Kenyatta’s new efforts to fight corruption. The vice is eating at the core of Kenya’s potential growth and standing among other nations globally.

It negates all past and present efforts at improving Kenyans’ living standards and denies the youth and future generations a decent shot at life. Now, if a chicken were to be spotted flirting with a hawk or a serpent with a vulture it would certainly not be business as usual. In a normal society, such an occurrence would elicit variations of ‘not business as usual’ reactions as people try to come to terms with the eventuality. It’s a crisis situation!

It is the situation we find ourselves in at the moment as a nation with regard to corruption, which has now permeated all the wrong places, afflicted the unlikeliest of groups and upset the order of doing business. While it is not business as usual for those who fully understand what it’s all about to have a crisis of confidence over key governance institutions, it is business as usual for beneficiaries and victims of corruption.

The victims and beneficiaries have formed a strange alliance which borders on the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ in which hostages developed sympathies for their captors. While the corrupt are busy inflicting immortal dents on anti-corruption war-chest, the citizenry are complacent in demanding accountability from the authorities and their representatives. In some situations, they empathise and zealously defend the same corrupt forces they ought to weaken.

They have no idea the damage they are inflicting on their collective well-being as a people. A few weeks ago, Kenya was ranked third in a global survey of economies projected to register the fastest growth this year. This is a great promise which portends well for the citizentry in terms of economic fortunes that would accrue from it. Yet Kenyans appear oblivious of the threat posed by corruption to the projected growth rates. They do not appear to know what corruption is doing to talents in the country.

They are unaware corruption is killing genuine businesses, which thrive on sheer hard work and tenacity of their founders and promoters. They seem unaware that corruption will weaken the Kenyan shilling and making it a laughing stock in international currency standings.

Rubber-scam

Corruption, if left untamed, will rob education, meritocracy and systems of reward of their value. It will lead to despair, confusion and hopelessness. If allowed to entrench itself fully in our system, corruption will drag us back to the state of nature where life was short, nasty and brutish, where a destructive war for one and all, against all is in the scheme of things.

Corruption will quadruple the cost of living and leave helpless Kenyans gasping for breath. It will further impoverish the poor and enrich the rich. If it continues to sit pretty in the minds of the people, corruption will wreck unrepairable damage to socio-political aspects of our lives.

More damaging however is the reputation we are gaining internationally as a result of festering corruption. The sum total effect of the chicken-gate saga, the rubber-scam and many other highly publicised scandals is the perception they have created in international community that Kenya is unpredictable investment destination. Genuine investors will shy off as unscrupulous briefcase dealers chip in to cash on the confusion and crisis of confidence.

Reputations, as is now widely known, are hard to build but easy to lose. Once a reputation is lost, it is lost for good. Kenyans of goodwill should stand by their government in its resolve to fight those who want to lose the country to corruption. They should not tolerate corruption in their dealings or entertain its glorification.

At the heart of this fight is not only the reputation of the country, but also the lives of millions of hard working Kenyans who desire to make an honest living. Kenyans cannot and must not appear to give up or join in the ‘eating’ fray. We must be steadfast in the awareness that corruption will, in the long run, destroy us all.

—The writer is Dagoretti South MP