“What do you want me to do?”
With that statement,
two weeks ago President Uhuru Kenyatta seemed to throw his hands up in
resignation. The most powerful man in the land claiming to be powerless in the
face of the rampant stealing of public resources that has now become the
hallmark of his administration.
It surely does
seem that everything the Jubilee administration touches turns to loot. Few of
the projects it has initiated over the last 43 months -from laptops for
schoolkids to the Standard Gauge Railway to the free maternity programme- have escaped
the reek of corruption. Anti-corruption crusader, John Githongo, says it is “by
far the most corrupt government in our history”.
And he should know. As
head of the Office of Governance and Ethics. he famously blew the lid off the
Angloleasing scandal, which annihilated the Mwai Kibaki regime’s anti-graft
credentials and earned him death threats and exile. Few will have forgotten how
in 2004 the then British High Commissioner, Edward Clay, described the gluttonous
Kibaki acolytes as “vomit[ing] all over our shoes”.
It is all so very
different from the euphoria that accompanied Kibaki’s electoral triumph and
assumption of office a year earlier. Then, it seemed, Kenya was well on the way
to slaying the proverbial corruption dragon. Kibaki and his National Rainbow
Coalition allies, including Raila Odinga, had built their campaign on an
unabashedly anti-corruption platform, promising to end the plunder the country
had experienced under his predecessors, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi.
Their campaign against
Moi’s “project” to install Uhuru Kenyatta as his successor, brought together
many of the leading lights of the decades-long agitation against the KANU
dictatorship (and not a few opportunistic politicians). Their sweeping victory
raised expectations for change to stratospheric levels. Imbued with the belief
that all was possible, that they were “unbwogable”, Kenyans were arresting
corrupt policemen on the street and expecting their new government to start doing
the same to corrupt politicians.
However, the
revelations of continuing theft in high place coupled with the de facto
immunity afforded to Nyayo era thieves, would bring such hope crashing down to
earth. And there seems no end to the hangover from those euphoric days, each
election has bought a government more corrupt than the last.
How did we come to
this?
In their insightful
book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson identify
the nature of a country’s institutions, whether extractive or inclusive, as the
primary determinant of its success. But unlike Kenya, where we equate
institutions to an alphabet soup of organisations, Acemoglu and Robinson
describe institutions as simply the rules, written and unwritten, that
influence how systems work. Countries where such rules encourage participation
by the masses, distribute political power broadly and subject it to constraint
will tend to be successful whereas, as Kenyans can attest to from experience,
those where the distribution of power is narrow and unconstrained will end up
with systems geared to enrich a powerful few at the expense of the rest.
The primary reason why
Kenya’s war against corruption remains little more than words on paper is
because we are focused on changing personalities and organisations rather than
the rules, or institutions, that underpin the system we inherited from the
British colonials. In 1963 it was all about getting rid of the “colonial
masters”. Half a century later, it was all about “Moi must go”. As the report
of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission demonstrated, the rules of
the game remained mostly unchanged. The government still functioned as a
vehicle of plunder, with the only difference being that in place of white
oppressors, we had black ones.
The inauguration of a
new constitution in 2010 was the first real effort to address this system but
here again, form is triumphing over substance. The fact of its passage
continues to be hailed as a success (and it is) even as its spirit is crushed.
Nominally independent institutions, such as the police and the Director of
Public Prosecutions, remain, for all intents and purposes, subservient to the
Presidential whim. Parliament, too, is little more than a lackey for the
executive. The political sphere still largely excludes participation by most
citizens in everyday governance while continuing to be the dominant influence over
their lives. Impunity for wielders of political power is still the norm.
Passing the new
constitution was just a necessary first step. As at independence, the real work
lies in its implementation and in overthrowing the authoritarian substructure
of the state to fit the aspirations the document espouses. This is where we are
failing. The exclusive focus on prosecutions and convictions (which are
necessary) sadly elides this.
It is true that the
constitution limits the role of the President in punishing offenders. But this
is not the problem. Where the President has been largely absent is in
articulating and leading the necessary reform to ensure that the state delivers
the system that the constitution he swore to uphold envisages.
That, Mr
President, is what we want you to do.
In the end, however,
it is up to the people to insist that their politicians respect the rules and values
espoused by the constitution. It is up to us to insist that accountability and
transparency rather than secrecy and impunity become the hallmarks of how the
public business is conducted. It is up to us to change the political calculus
that the Uhuru administration makes.
John Githongo is wrong
when he says “the era of fighting graft using public policy reform and
technical fixes has ended.” We still need to think through how we make the
system work for the masses of the people, and not just for a small elite. But
he is right when he says it requires political will. Only what matters is not political
will on the part of Uhuru Kenyatta but rather the political will of the Kenyan
citizenry to hold him to account.
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