Saturday, August 15, 2015

Kenya, It's Our Turn To Eat The Great Ugali

August 14, 2015

      
A tale is told of
a lavish wedding somewhere in Kenya. The groom’s family prepared a feast
massive enough to feed many hundreds of guests. The mountains of ugali were so
gigantic that friends sitting on one side of a serving had to eat for several
hours before, early in the evening, the chunk of ugali had receded enough for
one to realise the other had been eating on the other side all along. Only then
did they greet one another and celebrate the occasion having, as Idi Amin once
put it, eaten until they were ‘fed up!’
The Jubilee
government, its politicians, bureaucrats, courtiers and tenderprenuers, have
embarked on a corruption-inspired feast that is without comparison in Kenyan
history. It has gotten so blatant that bribes are solicited or extorted in
broad daylight and at the bottom of the scale the sums are no longer in the
hundreds but in the thousands of Shillings. Worse still social media and
mainstream press report on so many allegedly ongoing scams it has had a numbing
effect. The media is replete with scandals in almost all major government procurement
projects. Meanwhile every effort is made to keep the biggest of the
procurements secret from the Kenyan people. It is into the mire of this opacity
that even the President and Deputy President’s names are dragged. The results
are most apparent in the capital Nairobi, where a consumerist boom by a tiny
middle class is underway.
Iconic
institutions such as Kenya Airways and Uchumi Supermarkets have run into choppy
waters that are alleged in the press to be corruption-related as well.  There is this feeling that anything goes and
if you get caught its because your competitors arranged it or because you are
not in the right books politically.
Over a month ago, a
leading investor in a multibillion-shilling Tatu City Project, New Zealander
Stephen Jennings of Rendeavour, took an unprecedented step. He did this while
speaking with brutal frankness at one of the MindSpeak events hosted by local
investment guru Aly Khan Sachu. The tale he narrated was of alleged criminal
extortion by a former governor of the Central Bank and an icon of the private
sector using the police, judiciary and immigration authorities. It was the most
humiliating upbraiding by a foreign investor I have ever been embarrassed to
witness. His most unsettling observation was that some of Kenya’s key
governance institutions are more rotten than their counterparts in places synch
as Russia, the DRC and Nigeria.
Last year Kenya
slipped down the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index
to the lowest level since the mid-1990s. Bloomberg Business carried a piece on May 26 that expressed the underlying discomfiture of the
private sector with the government’s imploding anti-corruption fight. Generally
speaking though, the feeding frenzy by all and sundry has made the business
climate unpredictable and hostile to investors both local and international.
The business community generally does not complain about corruption if it is
consistent and predictable. But if they are confronted with a situation where
everyone is shaking them down their ability to plan diminishes and the complaints
rise exponentially. Kenya is fast acquiring a reputation as the best-endowed
economy in the region in terms of human capacity but also the most chaotically
corrupt. The morning Jennings addressed MindSpeak a gang of policemen and
immigration officials had raided his offices in the middle of a board meeting.
Thus we’ve become
a place where billionaire investors often leave State House inspired by presidential reassurances that their travails will be dealt with. They soon realise
the President’s word means nothing in the face of a bureaucracy, police and
other governance institutions that are in the process of criminalising.
Recent exposes
with regard to contracting at the Devolution ministry are a case in point. For
me the surprising thing was not that they emerged but that no one was really 
surprised. What Jubilee has created is
an eating machine that is cannibalistically consuming state institutions and
the very soul of Kenya. For even when the President rises to speak against
corruption – as he does often with feeling and consistency – it's now clear that
in all probability the red carpet he walks on, the cutlery he uses in State
House, the vehicles he rides in – all include a slice for this or that
ostensible ally of his; a percentage for this or that broker who has invoked
his name. It is an invidious position to be in.
As a result of all
this eating, institutions that are pillars of our democracy and society are
being hollowed out – eg the security services, the national examinations system,
the judiciary, the system that’s supposed to protect us from fake drugs and
poisonous foods. It is the age of transparency despite attempts to silence
‘critics’. The truth leaks out of this most secretive of regimes more than any
of its predecessors. All of it points to one truth that leaders would do well
to heed: Kenyans
are ‘fed up!’ Africans are a forgiving people. There is still time to make good
lest this regime end up with the legacy of the regime that celebrated theft as
enterprise; where conflict of interest was mistaken for business savvy; where
Kenyans ceased being citizens and became robotic consumers.


John Githongo is active in the anti-corruption field
regionally and internationally. githongo@githongo.com

- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/kenya-its-our-turn-eat-great-ugali#sthash.JUHA95s3.dpuf

No comments:

Post a Comment