Why politicians accused of graft have lucrative political careers

We Kenyans are a resilient lot, but I am not sure it is worthwhile showing this kind of resilience year in, year out if in the long run we expect nothing remarkable in return for our effort. It is the unique capacity to grow, cultivate and support a political class that is given, almost without exception to turn against our best interests. Nevertheless, we fervently protect it and could do it again many times over.

We are easily the most permissive society in the world when it comes to acquiescing to the political class. Just like everybody else, we gripe about the short end of the stick that they deal us. But that is about as far as our token dissent goes. By the strangest twist of fate, this point quasi consciousness marks where our politics gets the better of us (or rather we enable it get the better of us).

Almost unanimously, we concur that the bane of our country right now is the particularly debilitating and deleterious brand of politics we choose, cultivate and support.  However, instead of it becoming an affliction that we, the citizenry have to collectivize and agitate against as it should be the case. This is after any elections to keep errant elected officials in check if they go rogue, we get seduced by them. Consequently, we become enamored and soon enough come to espouse their fraudulent and diabolic kleptocratic tendencies.

The quick succession of economic scandals of mind boggling proportions from this year alone, are an apt exemplification of the crisis I am alluding to. It almost seems as if our political class has mastered the art of progressively making the populace numb to the shock of a succession of economic atrocities they visit on us on a now routine basis. In time, no amount of plunder seem to hold the capacity anymore to shock or evoke the kind of popular revolt such egregious crime should ordinarily elicit.

Ironically, it is us that, instead of becoming a collectivized bulwark against the regime of economic oppression we are constantly subjected to, we inexplicably morph into scaffolding upon which the political class to operate with unparalleled impunity to bilk us. Sadly, most of our actions today incentivize graft and only serve to flex the maws of the greedy and ravenous political class whose response has been a never-ending burgeoning capacity to gormandize public resources.

Essentially, in a democracy like ours, the ruled once they have expedited the business of electing the political leaders should strive to keep them on their toes lest they turn corrupt imps. Not in our case. We feel the pain of criticism directed at our politicians and consider any questions of impropriety they face an affront to us!

The curse of our political system today, which puts us in this predicament, is that it approximates loosely coalescing tribal factions masquerading as national parties when they are in fact tribal fraternities at their core. Any dissent directed at these plutocratic systems is framed as “opposition” to Maendeleo. It doesn’t matter the merits of the issues being raised against the ruling political class. And often, in most cases when criticism has arisen, egregious acts of economic banditry are self-evident, either committed by supporters of the state or by key members of it.  

Criticism is dismissed as merely opposition noise and referred to derisively as the vestiges of liberation opposition of a bygone era. As a sizable portion of the supporters of the governing coalition amplify this sentiment, the concerns end up lost in the din. And this is where the political class has perfected their sleight of hand when it comes to obfuscating legitimate concerns directed at them as is evidenced by the fact that when the dust clears following any one such particularly strident episode of condemnation, the charges will vanish in the noise and are soon forgotten. It helps that we too suffer from an acute case of collective amnesia.

Arguably, our politicians are among the best paid civil servants in the world. They also, by many metrics, do the least amount of work. Depending on the side of the coalition they lean towards, they can get many other additional perks some which include fraudulent payment for schemes antithetical to the services they are paid to render in the first place. The reports about members of influential oversight committees enjoying the largesse of the entities they are probing readily come to mind.

Perhaps most, the remarkable, if confounding phenomena about our politics is that, the most vocal these politicians become in “defending” their loose conglomerates, especially if this happens to be the ruling coalition, the more firm their tenure in office is reinforced.

Essentially, the section of the populace that regards itself as being “in government” takes it upon itself to defend anybody and anything that is remotely connected to propping the government they espouse, and fervently belief this to be their rightful role in a democracy. This is where our politicians have become magicians at manipulating public sentiment to favor their diabolic schemes.

As a consequence, our politicians get almost unfettered opportunities to rape and plunder and get away with even the most heinous acts of economic banditry.

The most paradoxical aspect of our politics is how most of our politicians get minted in the first place. Civil servants who have been purged because of economic crimes, and are otherwise unfit to hold office, enjoy the fastest lane to political office. A failed stint in the civil service, most certainly the one characterized by impropriety and out right charges of corruption, segues seamlessly into a profitable political career.

We are nearly almost certainly one of the few places in the world where you can flaunt and proudly parley notoriety occasioned by prominent roles in high profile graft and pilferage into a lucrative political career and succeed stupendously. These folks get the hottest political tickets in town not in spite of corruption blots in their record (or other egregious charges) but actually because of it.

So yes, we make our political class. We goad them into existence and we nurture and defend them sometimes with our blood. We then gripe, just enough to realize we could be undermining “one of our own” then promptly go right back into defending “our coalition” or
“our government” even when they doing things that perpetually go against our own best interests. Our political class is our creation and our bane too.

For redemption, we have to treat our political class more like a donkey. In order for the donkey to continue to convey us, it is necessary to whack and goad it from time to time to keep it on the task of speedy, timely and efficient delivery. Presently, we are doing an awful job of it and mainly getting nowhere.

The Writer is an Associate Professor of Education, St. Bonaventure University, New York.