Our weakness should not silence our values conversation

President William Ruto and businessman Aliko Dangote during the groundbreaking of the Dangote East Africa Petroleum Refinery in Mokowe, Lamu County. [PCS]

The mega oil refinery is a great project. The numbers are impressive, and its scale is worth acknowledging. But does a great project need to be presented with arrogance, chest-thumping, mystery and threats?

Why should asking legitimate questions be treated as pettiness or hostility? Questions are especially legitimate when a mega-project is being launched in a country that still has a serious corruption problem. The bigger the project, the bigger the integrity question.

One would hope a project of this magnitude would also serve as a transparency experiment. Yet the initial response to questions seems to celebrate opaqueness instead! Openness would not diminish the project; it would strengthen its credibility. It could turn around not only the economy, but also some of Kenya’s moral poverty because Kenya does not suffer only from economic poverty. We also suffer from moral poverty—the poverty of trust, integrity, accountability and transparency.

A mega-project that showed how billions can be managed openly and honestly would be more than an economic project. It would be a moral demonstration that Kenya can dream big without asking citizens to suspend their questions. The language of billions should not be used to command people to bow! Economic transformation must not require moral deafness.

The rhetoric of grandeur begins to sound Titanic. The Titanic was enormous, celebrated and widely described as “unsinkable.” But the ocean had an iceberg. Greatness is not immunity. Every project – however magnificent -still has vulnerabilities. It can be transformative and still require scrutiny. The iceberg is not an imaginary thing.

Political confidence can be Samsonic. Today Samson is strong; tomorrow there is a power failure. A billion-dollar project does not become corruption-proof because it is a billion-dollar project. The bigger the project, the bigger the integrity question.

But here we arrive at another question: who has the right to ask the moral questions? This is where many become hesitant to talk about values. We fear being dismissed as valueless—and therefore as having no moral ground from which to speak about uprightness. We think, Who am I to talk about morality when I, too, have fallen short? Others will say, “We know your story. Shut up!” But if we think this way, who can talk about morality? Exactly.

And that is what the amoral want: a mute sign on the moral volume. Once the moral voice is silenced, they are free to create their own system of how things should be run, without the constraints of declared moral standards. Greed becomes pragmatism. Vice becomes inevitable. Wrongdoing becomes “how things are done.” Morality becomes a tool of convenience—invoked when useful and dismissed when inconvenient.

Biblical wisdom frees us from this fear. It does not require us to speak as people who have never been blind. It invites us to speak as people who have seen the light. “For I was blind, but now I see.” The testimony is not, I was never blind. Nor is it, I have never stumbled. It is, I can see now. Moral speech does not require moral perfection. It requires moral awakening. We do not speak about uprightness because we have never fallen. We speak because grace does not make morality unnecessary; it gives us the courage to pursue it. Sometimes the person who has known blindness has the clearest reason to insist that the light must not be switched off. So when they say, “You have no right,” you can say, “I have a light.”

This is why the old saying, People who live in glass houses should not throw stones, needs careful handling. It is a fair warning against hypocrisy. But turned into a rule, it silences everyone. Who does not live in a glass house? Even those who live in stone houses have a glass wall somewhere! The church is a glass house too—sometimes a very brittle one. If we wait for morally flawless people to speak about morality, the moral conversation will never begin.

One leader says, “We have values.” Another responds, “Who are you to talk about values?” But the question remains: Who will talk about values? A country that does not subscribe to a shared value system is like a house built on sand. However grand it appears, it will develop fractures because its foundations cannot carry its weight. The more it falls, the weaker its stability becomes.

In the case of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus invited the sinless to step forward and throw first. This exposed the glass in which the stone-wielders lived. What followed was a fall of stones, not on the woman, but on the ground! But Jesus did not end the moral conversation. He still spoke the corrective word: “Go, and sin no more.”

So acknowledge your glass house, but do not be arrested by it. We can confess our cracks and still speak about foundations. We can admit our failures and still insist that corruption is wrong. We can know our blindness and still testify to light.

And yes, the glass estate is full of serious stone throwers! When a stone lands at your door, you can return it hard for hard, which is deeply satisfying but leaves everyone with more cracks and a very expensive glazing bill. Or you can gather it. Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall with stones lying in ruins around him. A stone thrown at you can become part of your foundation if you allow it to show you where your house needed strengthening.

Speaking of stones, a friend once said: when you throw stones, throw the earthy kind—the kind that disintegrates on impact. A hard stone is likely to be returned, often with greater force. An earthy stone speaks of motive. A hard stone is correction thrown to win. An earthy stone is correction thrown to build. It lands, makes its point, and crumbles into soil, leaving nothing to throw back and something in which a better life can take root.

Perhaps this is the moral opportunity hidden inside the Lamu refinery itself. Kenya does not need to choose between economic greatness and moral greatness. We need both. The refinery can be great in its engineering, its investment, its employment and its economic ambition. But it should also challenge us to become great in transparency, accountability, justice and public trust. The real transformation would be to build a project so open that scrutiny strengthens it rather than threatens it.

Let us not silence the values conversation because we are imperfect. Let us encourage it for that very reason: we are imperfect!