Is Uhuru’s political will to end corruption enough?

The President has recently shown signs that he is willing to fight corruption in his administration. And to signal that he has political will to do the same, he suspended high ranking public officials, including suspects in the Deputy President’s office. The list of shame presented in Parliament showed that the President is willing to spend some political capital to rid the government of corrupt officials. But will he succeed? Should the President have adopted a subtler approach?

Most of the time the discussion hinges on whether or not our leaders have the political will to eradicate the vice. Most Kenyans react with demands that guilty parties be sacked and prosecuted, then jailed. But when corruption is as endemic as it is in Kenya, the solution to the vice gets complicated than that. Our reality is that an unalloyed prosecution of corruption would most likely lead to the collapse of the entire government. Nearly every government official, including at the very top, has been adversely mentioned over corruption.

No one is clean enough to cast the first stone. Not at the Judiciary, or the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, or the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office, or even the police.

This state of affairs calls for a smarter approach to fight the vice than we have taken. Of course the first step should be to honestly interrogate why corruption continues to self-perpetuate in the public sector. Doing so reveals that different public officials at different levels of government have different reasons for being corrupt. There are those that steal our hard-earned tax shillings simply because they can. These people are rich, they are well paid, and engage in the vice for the simple reason that all people, when left unsupervised, will engage in self-seeking behavior that at times may be harmful to society. This class of public servants should be prosecuted and locked away. Simply stated, the approach to this group of corrupt officials should be purely a law enforcement issue and the strengthening of monitoring of public officials through greater transparency.

Then there are public officials that are corrupt because they have to live. They work long hours but are not paid a livable wage. Their work environment is also characterised by a cartel like organisation in which their colleagues and superiors collude in the collection and sharing of bribes. For these public officials, there is almost no incentive to not be corrupt. The clean simply lose their jobs. Examples here may include the police and customs and immigration officials. Clearly the approach to eradicating corruption in this case ought to be different than in the case outlined above. Here, prosecution alone would not end the vice. A more holistic approach is more likely to succeed, by ensuring that, for example, police officers are well paid; that the corruption cartels are broken, and the leaders brought to book; and that we change laws to protect officials that report their corrupt superiors to the authorities.

In addition, the incentive system created by such cartels of corruption means that we need a shock and awe approach. For instance, giving the police a surprise substantial raise is more likely to work than gradually increasing their pay over time. Chances of success may also increase if we include social incentives for reform as well. For instance, we may raise the cost of being corrupt by including in the pay package a promise of free education for the first four children of all police officers up to the tertiary level or a permanent housing scheme. This way, the individual police officer would have to consider whether shaking down a matatu on Thika road is worth the risk of losing the house and the chance of educating the children. People respond to incentives.

Lastly, let us consider the political class. This group of people is arguably the most corrupt. They are also the most corrosive to our social public. You see, as a general matter, whether a society becomes accepting or intolerant to corruption is a matter of coordination. That is, if everyone expects everyone they meet to be corrupt, then the best course of action is also to be corrupt. The two states of society therefore represent two different equilibria. And there is nothing that signals that society is corrupt than a politician that brazenly grabs primary school playgrounds, or uses state resources for personal enrichment.

The lesson here is that as long we have senior politicians who are known to be corrupt, and get away with it, the public will have the perception that we are in the “corrupt society” equilibrium, and respond accordingly. This is why the president must fight corruption from the top; and also realise the nuances that dictate the incentives for being at different levels of government.