‘Mambo ni matatu’: This is how zero tolerance confronts corruption

What we call corruption is formal policy to the extent that public resources are treated as mere appurtenances of private estates.

Unsurprisingly, these supermen are extremely popular, easily winning election after election by stupendous margins, often in the region above 80 percent, and ruling for many decades.

The tyranny of these democratically elected strongmen induces such despair that the most unthinkable of egregious political taboos become the only feasible sources of respite. This is how militaries enter the political fray and coups become tolerable.

The resulting scheme boggles the mind. Soldiers in combat fatigues transform into heroic liberators and armed stewards of democracy, while hitherto wildly popular democratic leaders are banished in utter ignominy.

Last week, I saw the president of the Law Society of Kenya posing behind a bunch of civil society activists at a press conference convened to castigate the president over the implacable resolve with which certain productive interventions were undertaken to disrupt and dismantle corruption cartels.

The president has declared his commitment to decisive and drastic action to eradicate corruption, wastage, theft, embezzlement and other malpractices involving public resources, setting out three broad options available to the corrupt: jail, flight or go to heaven.

The activists, finding common cause with the Opposition, exploded in indignation, claiming that the president’s declaration was disrespectful of due process and amounted to violation of the rule of law.

They further pointed out that matters like these should be taken before the courts, and that the executive must not overreach itself and interfere with claims and controversies in the proper purview of the judiciary.

This disingenuous intervention amply demonstrates how corruption can capture and lay to waste not only public institutions, but also public consciousness, even of iconic champions of good governance.

We all know that accountability remains outstanding for the Goldenberg daylight robbery, whereby corruption cartels in both public and private sectors, fronted by Kamlesh Pattni, looted the National Treasury dry, leaving a tottering economy in its wake.

This is because Pattni deployed the immense war chest mobilised through Goldenberg, to institute a recursive sequence of legal causes aimed at staying adverse action and disrupting accountability. He remains at large and untouchable insofar as judicial due process has been configured to protect him from accountability.

Mumias Sugar Company was once a thriving and highly competitive giant of the sugar industry, and its sugarcane out-grower ecosystem was a global example of how the cooperative movement can empower smallholders and drive rural prosperity.

It has since been plundered into an insolvent husk sagging under the weight of debt and vulnerable to the acquisitive machinations of deadly cartels with a voracious eye on billions, which exploit judicial due process, including the insolvency regime, to take over the assets of the firm on the sly in the knowledge that Mumias is perfectly viable.

In Mumias, as elsewhere in this country, serious economic crimes are under active commission. The deleterious consequences of corruption are daily manifested by the impunity with which strategic national assets have been brought to their knees, and how cartels brazenly abuse the court process to purchase immunity from accountability.

The president’s a duty as a state officer and head of state extends beyond merely waiting on the outcomes of strategic litigation by the corrupt. Corruption is an existential threat to our nation.

He has a duty to use all means at his disposal to stop the commission of grave crimes as soon as they are brought to his notice.

The idea that robbers, bandits and other criminals must be left to have their way and that the state is utterly powerless in the face of impunity, is itself a most corrupt proposition, that is not suggested by the letter not spirit of the law.

As pertains the ‘go to Heaven’ option, the president’s critics are displaying horribly defective eschatology.

On the Last Day, we shall all be alive and in fact, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and the living shall be given new bodies for the journey to heaven.

The idea that death is the mandatory gateway to heaven is very corrupt. Perhaps, as a good Christian, he said “go to Heaven” instead of the more usual dismissal: go to hell!

Through the president, we saw the concise enunciation of zero tolerance for corruption and from the melodramatic effusions of the LSK and the civil society, we beheld impunity marvellously arrayed in its Sunday best.

There is a reason why democracy is said to be on retreat in many parts of the world, and why there is skepticism about the rule of law. In many cases, they have been rigged through impunity to facilitate inimical interests and corrupt outcomes.

- Mr Ngéno is an advocate of the High Court