Several years ago, I worked under a boss who, whenever he was miffed that someone had missed their target, would call them over to his imposing office.
“Hey, I called you here because I noticed we paid your salary for the whole of the last quarter,” he would calmly start, gazing fixedly at you.
“Yes I was paid, why?” you’d go.
“What were we paying for?” he would go on, springing to his feet, the veins in his face dilating with fury.
Looking at Kenya today, one feels like summoning leaders and asking them what we are paying for.
As a taxpayer, voter, conscientious worker, honest adult and right-thinking citizen, I am horrified that a billion, a lot of money if put to good use, has started looking like loose change in our corruption stories.
What gets me more incensed is, even in open-and-shut cases of theft, we seem to have acquiesced to the ritual of listening to conflicting and convoluted tales. We watch as those mentioned in multi-billion-shilling scams take turns to spin creative yarn after yarn and pass the buck faster than we can blink. A new national sport right there, no?
And it’s all an old script. If someone steals taxpayers’ money, he or she can launder themselves in a simple but horribly nauseating procedure. The person files a statement at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). Anti-graft authorities spend up to eight hours “grilling” him or her. The file may later be taken to or asked for by the Directorate of Public Prosecutions to “determine whether there is evidence to sustain a case”.
In a bad month, the file may be sent back to the DCI. If nothing happens to deflect national attention from the matter, parliamentary committees would be falling over one another to grill the persons of interest. They call suspects and witnesses one after the other - pocketing allowances, of course. If big names are mentioned, coalition politics set in and there is intense lobbying, threatening, cajoling and dangling of carrots to save well-connected cronies.
This delays the ritual retreat to some posh resort in Naivasha or South Coast to write the final “explosive” report. All this while, those hired and highly paid to protect public cash or to smoke out thieves continue eating meat courtesy of huge salaries, sitting allowances, per diem on useless junkets abroad and “my cut”.
Village hecklers are also roped into the gravy train. A political mobiliser must be hired to marshall the youth, women, elders and other social categories to demonstrate and show tribal solidarity with the accused. Never mind they were nowhere in the picture when millions were being shared out.
So what am I saying?
The much-touted war against corruption is fast being lost to a monster that has all along been doing press-ups in hell.
As those paid highly to fight graft mark time in expensive suit(e)s as more well-connected tenderprenuers continue striding into the sunset with our cash. And the land of the brave majestically marches forth towards the no-man’s-land of raw impunity.
If nothing is done, it will soon be free-for-all. When, and God forbid, those willingly paying taxes ever come to ask themselves “What are we paying for?”, we will have crossed the proverbial Rubicon.
Get very worried, those who give Sh50 to the police to sell chang’aa after midnight already see it as a right to earn a living. Those who kill passengers in defective matatus for Sh50 see it as an effort to better their lives. Corruption, my friend, is nowadays perpetrated by “others”.
When all suspects start painting their past deeds as public-spirited, it might as well be an acceptable way of life. And, if you look keenly, corruption is fast becoming a nebulous shifting target, depending on who you talk to. God help us!
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