President Kenyatta should make war on graft personal affair if he is to win

The cinch is that few individuals will heed Uhuru Kenyatta’s warning to corrupt public servants to resign. Everybody knows this from the evidence of our history. In the Third World, nobody ever sees the need to stand aside whenever mentioned in adverse circumstances.
In any case, to resign publicly is to announce to the whole extremely interested world that you are among the leeches busy leading Kenya — as a colonial governor once put it — “unto darkness and death”. Yet one thing is certain. Kenya has reached the apex of rapacity and graft in all walks of life, private as well as public.

That is why many Kenyans are likely to have greeted the President’s call with the cynicism, which has gripped the country as a result of the habit by our political class — ever since independence — to make promises that it never intends to keep. Many are likely to have dismissed the President with: “How many times have we heard it before?”

NEGATIVE REACTION

But such a negative reaction will not yield even a single embe or fenesi. We have a young and well educated President. Extraordinarily energetic and alert, he knows the depth of the abyss into which Kenya may sink if he allows his political machine to sink to the level of that of Nigeria, Egypt and Mobutu’s Congo.

Apart from whodunit economic crimes that President Kenyatta inherited from the Kibaki and Moi systems — including Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing — about a myriad of cases of high-level thievery and fiddling with the books are reported from just about every ministry, department and parastatal organisation.

It is, of course, proper to issue a warning every now and then. It may cow many criminals and would-be criminals. But warnings are like certain human disease germs. They learn to skirt around certain medicines to make these ultimately ineffective. Only a sudden decisive attack with a certain medicinal rod will cut any ice.

In a word, if the President is serious about putting paid to the financial cobweb now accumulating in every nook and cranny of power, he has only one choice. I daresay that, from his intricate network of intelligence, he knows hundreds of examples of individuals and groups who dip long fingers into the public’s coffers.

I often marvel silently at the amount of political capital that the President would bag just by occasionally invading “headquarters” (as China’s Chairman Mao used to put it) — namely, the head office of a ministry, a department, a parastatal, Parliament, the county and the ruling party — publicly exposing the filth and parading the officials responsible for it.

PUBLIC INSPECTION

For when a country has sunk so deeply into the quagmire of grabbing from Wanjiku (that personification of the vestal virgin to which we fain would return our country) all weapons should be made available — including, when the priesthood’s moral fulminations do not seem to sink into anybody’s head, the rough end of the stick.

Where the sacerdotal class itself would do with a thorough public inspection, somebody — such as in Uhuru Kenyatta’s position — must dedicate himself or herself to saving the country from imploding upon itself as a consequence of this concerted depletion of the whole nation’s collective granaries.

For that task, I propose Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta because he is young, knowledgeable, idealistic and possessing the publicly given authority to perform just such a task for his young nation — a nation yearning to cross the Rubicon of poverty, but a nation cruelly and perennially prevented from doing so by the same “invisible worm” that once invaded the poet’s “rose”.

President Kenyatta has even an objective personal interest in it. What a colossal figure of history he would cut if he acted in and I know not what way to save Kenya from the jaws of the shark in which it now finds itself.

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