In Kenya’s pathetic case, who can be trusted as auditor?

In typical Western liberal simple-mindedness, Agatha Christie has – in her whodunit fiction – a character who could tell a “commie” just by the kind shoes one was wearing. A “commie” was one of those dreaded agents of Joseph Stalin’s self-styled “communist” regime.

Similarly, in a pseudo-science called “phrenology”, Cesare Lombroso, a learned Italian Jew, could determine a person’s character just by looking at the person’s shape of jaw or colour of skin. In this way, the phrenologists were able to declare that all black people were “criminal by nature”.

The intellectual absurdity of it lay in that such Caucasian Europeans were speaking up to five centuries after their own William Shakespeare – the much better educated Hermetic guru of yore – had ordained (in a tragic play called Macbeth) that “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

Had there been such an art, King Duncan would have known much better – and much earlier – than to put such vital trust in Macbeth, one of his military generals, a man who – egged on by his own wife – developed a “vaulting ambition” to overthrow and kill the Scottish monarch.

That is why Kenya’s situation is so reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. What we urgently need at the head of our anti-corruption campaign are superlatively clean individuals thoroughly committed to Hercules’ task of removing the veritable Kilimanjaro of filth that we have accumulated in our own King Augeus’ stable (the infamous “Augean stable”).

But the question is ineluctable: How can we ever latch onto a proper person for the helm of that agency? Which one of us – as individuals and institutions – is in a position to make such an appointment without being influenced by such corrupting considerations as the appointee’s tribe, race or links to wealth and power?

ALL ACCUSSED OF BEING ON THE TAKE

For such considerations are what make our alleged war on rapacity and graft such a study in farcical drama. No, I know nothing against Mr Mumo Matemu and Ms Irene Keino except that – like all their predecessors (who were then ignominiously driven out of office) – they have been accused of being “on the take”.

“On the take” is the Kenyan cynic’s term for the alacrity with which centrally placed officials demand and receive a quid pro quo – “something for something” (in millions of quid) – before they will do anything for you. In Kenya, bribery (the more prosaic name for it) is the holy path to heaven that God has laid down.

We know it from the fact that many of God’s own sacerdotal spokesmen and women are among Kenya’s most dedicated donors and takers. There is thus no reason to expect that hoi polloi – the admiring ordinary regular goers to church, mosque, pagoda, temple, whatnot – will behave any differently.

Our spectacular national failure to place self-respecting and morally unimpeachable individuals at the vanguard of our national war on public fleecing can only mean that we have failed, equally spectacularly, to agree on an effective yardstick of qualification.

It means that we have not yet found a foolproof method of laying our social hands on the most appropriate anti-corruption generals and lieutenants. In a society which has long ago overtaken Chicago, Lagos, London, Rome and Sodom-and-Gomorrah as the paradise of social putrefaction, that is not an easy task.

If – as we learned this week – the legislative vies with the executive in the race to grab, the question becomes inevitable: In a country where every social stratum and walk of life has sunk to the very bottom of moral decay, who can be trusted as the auditor? Who will monitor whom?

What is to be done? These questions demand urgent answers. Quite clearly, what we need is an all-inclusive national conference to discuss and agree on how we can together rescue this country from falling into the Sargasso Sea from which no citizen would ever again emerge alive.

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