Why Gachagua's impeachment debate is a diversion

For the avoidance of doubt, the ongoing process to impeach Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua is a terrible diversion.

On one hand, it looks like a legitimate political process that raises more legal questions than answers.

Beyond questions already in court about the credibility, order and timing of public participation, or, more dramatically, the legality of the National Assembly itself (think, gender rule), there is probably a further one about if one who was a presidential candidate who selected a running mate on a ticket on which they were jointly elected can change the ticket mid-term.

Wasn’t the constitution’s point to ensure we would not fire deputies on whim and suspicion? So that it was the whole ticket we would judge next time they stood for office?

This is the angry logic inspiring the people’s matatu-inspired kufa dereva, kufa makanga (for the conductor to go, so must the driver) as an equal commentary on the state of our chaotic, yet organised, public transport as a public, not private, good.

These statements don’t just come out of thin air. Lest we forget, Kenya’s matatu industry’s long history was birthed in the Mount Kenya region that was Kenya Kwanza’s core voter base for the “bottom-up” agenda they sold in 2022.

On the other hand, our macro-economic fundamentals seem to be getting better. Inflation is falling as a general measure of how fast the cost of living is rising. The shilling is happy for now around 128/129 to the US dollar.

So we had a useful Central Bank of Kenya interest rate cut last week. We also had a general wage increase announced by Ministry of Labour. On the face of it, our four macro-prices are doing better, if not yet good. So too our big economic balances.

The current account deficit has fallen as we move to export more and import less. And if we strip out the overhang of debt and interest, even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledges our progress in getting to a primary fiscal surplus (meaning our revenue less expenditure except debt interest (not service) is in the positive).

The only problem here is ordinary people don’t celebrate macro-economic results, they celebrate improvements in their lives – decent livelihoods, dignified and safe living and food on the table.

The real problem, to combine the two opposing perspectives, is that we seem to be rapidly replacing old crony capitalism with new crony capitalism, and we don’t live or eat “macro-babble”.

As said before, Kenya Kwanza’s Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (Beta) is a long game. As also said, it is an extraordinary, or as they call it, heterodox (mixed rather than non-conformist) agenda that can’t afford our traditional primitive accumulation.

This is why the most interesting news of the week was that this administration has acceded to an IMF governance and corruption diagnostic across all of our public institutions by actually asking for it to be done.

Of course, this diagnostic helps release funds for our current programme with them, while creating space for our next one. Basically, we want their orthodox help to deliver our heterodox agenda.

Let’s stick with the idea of this diagnostic. What we really don’t need is a checklist driven “rule of law, control of corruption” checklist-driven exercise like the World Bank’s now-discredited (and soon to be replaced) “ease of doing business” one that looked at rules rather than practice.

Remember, we supposedly improved the ease of business on paper but not the cost in reality. And that’s largely because we are a lovely “paperwork” country; more papers than principles!

Which is why we also don’t need a “we used it elsewhere” (probably in war-torn countries) diagnostic. What we need is a “you know it, so why aren’t you dealing with it” diagnostic.

I am making these deliberate points because we don’t really need a sham, another endless diversion. And we don’t want yet another report telling us about more anti-corruption laws and other rules.

What we might really like is a conclusion that speaks actively to implementation and enforcement. From a proper diagnostic that begins with how our leadership over time has excelled in re-purposing the public state towards private ends. The experts call this state capture, which might call to mind the very loud promise Kenya Kwanza made on the 2022 campaign trail.

State capture is our crudest point, but its close cousin policy capture is just as bad. The difference here might be that the first takes the farm while the second simply controls it.

Neither of these approaches, which are well-organised crony capital, but structured criminal enterprises, has been on the radar. They are driven by politics, so this diagnostic must be political, not just technical.

The second level of this diagnostic might look at budgeted corruption which also happens in two ways. The first is the planning stage, where the main tool is projectation.

It isn’t rocket science to find not just causation but correlation between the rise in project numbers and corruption (and waste) since 2013, or between the number of state departments and these first two.

Or interrogate why national government still obsesses on projects when we have counties. Or why, in the perfect example of delegated corruption, we end up with even more projects at county and constituency level.

Lest we forget, projects are the place where we design “exit lanes” to siphon off the excess funds we throw into the budgets that follow these plans.

The second budgeted corruption stage is far simpler. Why engage in the complexity of an elaborate project process when you can simply pad the budget?

Projects are capital expenditure, but budget padding goes to our operating costs, including, amazingly, our staff payrolls. This is the territory in which procurement officers are a central cog of the graft machine.

Despite all of the supposed high-tech, our budgeting system is still weak enough to allow all manner of bloated cost inputs. We heard recently about a new costing tool in IFMIS, but systems don’t steal, people do. As a technical aside, it is unlikely that this new tool is even close to proper costing.

The final part of the diagnostic — after policy, planning, budgeting and procurement — is service delivery, or bribery and speed money as its corruption corollary.

Let’s just say that if e-citizen, government’s procurement portal, cannot seem to properly account for itself, how then is it even a tool of public transparency and accountability, let alone an actual anti-corruption device? That’s even before we get to our eternally corrupt police force and it’s organised chain of command.

Here’s a closing thought. This noisy impeachment is not Kenya Kwanza’s opportunity for course correction.

A credible, honest IMF graft diagnostic is a start, if not the end. In the deeply embedded state of corruption in our politics, economy and society, this is a long game. When the people say kufa dereva, kufa makanga they are asking existential questions of Kenya.

Because if we ever get to the point of popular revolution, it is this leadership that is on the menu.