From teapot despots to unethical hackers, graft is a perilous monster 

It seems that the era of explosive revelations by investigative journalists is here.

As we speak, the Kenyan tea industry, whose mainstay is small-holder undertakings by rural farmers, stands in grave danger of global sanction by outraged consumers in international markets that import our tea as a premium product.

The international furore has been ignited by heart-breaking accounts of runaway misconduct by managers of the large-scale tea estates owned and operated by foreign multinational corporations. 

The misconduct relates to the sexual exploitation of vulnerable workers who are under monstrous pressure to obtain and retain a job and are confronted with propositions of the most depraved order by these odious tyrants.

In particular, the investigative expose recorded instances where male managers, who are reported to have raped countless female workers, were on the verge of violating the female undercover investigative journalist. 

That turn of events is breathtakingly horrific, as it graphically depicts the reckless, indiscriminate voracity of these despots’ appetites.

At the moment, all Kenyan tea exports may be in grave jeopardy of boycotts in the market, which would deal a devastating blow to the economy and the livelihoods of smallholder households. 

Stolen land

The irony is that the necessary accountability for ‘teapot dictators’ that threaten to retire Kenya as a tea-exporting economy, is being inflicted by a righteous international market that has been more than comfortable accepting a product grown on stolen land. 

It is documented history that the tea estates were taken through force of arms by colonialists who violently evicted indigenous inhabitants, repatriated some of them and converted the rest into indentured slaves. 

This market has likewise found the fact that London adamantly resists actions for reparations, to be a particularly delicious note on the sophisticated tea-drinking palate.

Last week, an international consortium of investigative journalists captured an Israeli contractor boasting about his role in setting up machinery to conduct disinformation campaigns and undertake data manipulation on behalf of a campaign. 

After issuing a perplexing cornucopia of absurd effusions on the subject of ethical hacking, the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Alliance Coalition leader, Raila Odinga, has since resorted to a dedicated campaign of prayer and intercession on behalf of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

Pandora Papers 

It appears that the Pandora Papers era, which was itself a cataclysmic sensation, is now firmly in the category of the tame and archaic. Under the new model of investigative coverage, powerful people are being recorded in flagrante delicto, and in the case of the teapot dictators, with their pants down.

Three years ago, a political corruption scandal in Namibia led to the resignation of two powerful Cabinet insiders, after it emerged that they had set up an elaborate mechanism for transmitting and laundering millions of dollars in bribes to enable international fishing concerns profitably circumvent ministerial regulations that everyone else followed.

The evidence was graphic, detailed and utterly damning. For years, ministers were engaging with rigged-up investigative journalists posing as investors with bag loads of dollars to feed the ministers’ corrupt appetites.

It may very well be that such operations are underway in Kenya, or, perhaps, even concluded. What, then? 

A very interesting statement in the Namibian expose was that the term ‘consultant’ is very common in bribery.

As you will recall, a larger-than-life Jubilee, Handshake and Azimio insider revelled in proclaiming his credentials as such a consultant whenever corruption in infrastructure projects was discussed.

What is the best advice we should offer powerful people about engaging ‘investors’? Is it too late, and therefore, kama mbaya, mbaya? Ought they be more careful, and employ more sophisticated webs of offshore trusts and shell companies?

Perhaps they should just not even consider that path to wealth, or stop if they are somewhere along the way. 

Overpowered by bandits

Corruption is actually extremely dangerous. Not just because of the perverse opportunity costs that translate to people suffering and dying in tremendous agony owing to a lack of medicine for treatable conditions. Or grisly road crashes because road designs were compromised and poor road quality results in dangerous potholes. Or soldiers and policemen being overpowered by bandits and terrorists because politicians and commanders sank billions in scrap metal acquisitions instead of actual equipment. And so on, and so forth.

Like the perverse considerations that made a host procure pyrotechnics that terrorised his guests upon deployment, corruption is lethal in direct ways. 

In Turkey, at least two contractors, reputed to be responsible for the majority of collapsed buildings that killed thousands of people, were found attempting to flee across the border into the vast, dark unknown.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the building that houses the professional institute for civil engineers stood utterly unperturbed. The whole tragedy reminds us that standards exist to keep us safe and that playing games with them — which is what corruption does — is stupid and dangerous.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.