Why every Kenyan must fight corruption

Opinion and Analysis

 

By JOE KIEYAH

The government’s pro-growth strategies of production cost reduction have been locally criticised, notwithstanding the global affirmation of Kenya’s imminent economic takeoff.

Unexpectedly, but quite pleasantly, the economic data cited by the President in his State of the Nation address last week predicted a robust economic turn that was witnessed prior to the post-election violence.

However, the President’s rousing speech was watered down by his reiteration of the corruption epidemic and its imminent threat of aborting our economic takeoff as well as suffocating the growth of our young democracy.

The President’s gutsy move against corruption was greeted with public approval.

Admittedly, corruption has mutated from fairly timid manifestation of isolated abuse of public offices shortly after independence into a bold and ravenous trend in recent times.

It has indiscriminately invaded virtually all our institutions including the three arms of government.

Its prevalence in type, intensity and brazenness has been a policy concern for quite sometime but there has never been sufficient political will to face it head on.

Instead, we enacted anti-corruption laws that have been operating in policy vacuum that rendered the laws ineffective.

Generally, corruption is a manifestation of citizens’ inability to hold their representatives accountable which is attributable to information asymmetry, lack of democratic traditions, ethnically diverse population with glaringly income disparities, high poverty levels among other.

Consequently, the absence of accountability has incentivised our elected representatives to discretionally discharge their duties with little or no regard to public interest.

Empirically, countries that pay their public sector more than the private sector have relatively low levels of corruption. Thus increasing public sector wages can be expected to reduce corruption.

However, the reprehensible behaviour of our elected representatives, driven by never-ending insatiable greed of more money that is not tied to their productivity times has seemingly defied this assertion.

Indeed, the supply of corruption will create its own demand. We are undoubtedly beneficiaries and perpetrators of corruption.

Consequently, any public outcry that heaps the burden against corruption on the President’s shoulder is completely unjust and self-serving. We are all responsible.

The President’s trumpet has summoned each one of us to give testimony to national loyalty. Such loyalty embodies a commitment of unwillingness to witness or permit corruption to deviate us from our development path of becoming a more cohesive, just, inclusive and prosperous nation

It is for this reason and many more that we must collectively emulate the President and draw the line against corruption.

But as we dutifully execute our responsibilities of making our representatives accountable, we should never allow our differences of opinion to degenerate into a trap of ethnicity and name calling.

Such a trap would only provide a safe haven to corrupt representatives to invoke the common narrative of ethnic victimisation whenever they get into trouble.

In our hands, more than our representatives, will rest the final success or failure of our course of eradicating corruption.

We must therefore forever conduct ourselves on a higher plane of ethical and moral standards that we are asking our representatives to uphold. This we must do.

Prof Kieyah is a principal policy analyst at KIPPRA. Views expressed are personal.

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