The monster within: The politics of greed and the murder of conscience

UDA Secretary General Hassan Omar Hassan during a press briefing in Nairobi where he luanched a scathing attack on Kenya's mainstream media. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

Kenya wakes up to unending narratives of greed and death. Headlines on billions of shillings lost, stolen, or dealt, all speak to the man-eat-man society that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere spoke of in the 1960s. But did Tanzania’s independence president speak too soon about the collapse of the ethos of his neighbours?

We often imagine that societies collapse through dramatic events. A revolution, a war, an economic crisis. More often, they decline quietly. It is a cancerous invasion that metastasizes over time, to turn a society into a massive greedy machine that does not know where to stop.