WHAT OTHER SAY: War on corruption: The bigger issue is not the ‘eating’, but the ‘how’

Opinion/Editorial

 

All three Treasury bill auctions were last week oversubscribed. PHOTO | FILE 

By Charles Onyango -Obbo

In Summary

However, he then released the now famous “List of Shame” as Kenyans on Twitter quickly dubbed it, and the dominoes starting falling.

You never see these things coming. Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta goes to Parliament to make a regular State of the Nation address, and indeed it starts as such.

Then he drops the hammer, and asks government officials being investigated for corruption to step aside. Matters would have ended there, and they have done in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa in the past.

However, he then released the now famous “List of Shame” as Kenyans on Twitter quickly dubbed it, and the dominoes starting falling.

So far, five of his cabinet has had to do the side dance. Though many have sniggered at the move as mostly symbolic, and most of the people on the list will be cleared and back in government and back to their old ways, clearly the public appetite for some corruption blood is high.

Many people are excited and happy that the president did what he did.

The “List of Shame” should, however, trouble us for bigger reasons. The Kenyatta cabinet is technocratic, and one of the things the country’s new constitution sought to achieve by providing for a cabinet of unelected politicians, was to eliminate corruption and improve efficiency.

All over Africa we have come to the view that corruption in politics is primarily driven by electoral politics; political ministers collect bribes and steal public funds to pay off the debts of the last election, build a war chest for the next contest, and to keep their constituents happy, all things they cannot from their salaries.

Secondly, civil servants fearing they will be sacked or demoted with the change of government at election, steal as a way of fast-forwarding their terminal benefits.

However, we have seen that cabinet secretaries who have no constituencies to nurse, are on the “List of Shame.” Some, if not all, might be cleared, but the fact that the major of cabinet secretaries are not on the list, means it was possible to avoid it.

A technocratic cabinet was a structural reform to avoid the situation that Kenya is in – of serious progress against corruption happening only if the president as an individual stepped into the fight.

So what else is left?

My sense is that the outrage about corruption is not just over the “eating.” Rather it’s about outcomes.