Why is Covid money so sweet?

Kenyans have been unusually angry — and almost united — since the exposure documentary #COVID19Millionaires by NTV a fortnight ago about the corruption in coronavirus-related tenders, and the theft of personal protective equipment (PPE) donated by rich philanthropists like Jack Ma.

More depressing, Kenya is not alone.

People have profited criminally big on Covid-19 in Europe, in the US (including pharmaceutical companies overselling treatments and vaccines to juice their share price on the stock exchange), in Asia, and here in Africa. From Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, DR Congo, Nigeria, and South Africa, it is a wild feeding frenzy.

In South Africa, Covid-19 corruption might even break up the ruling African National Congress (ANC). There, it was alleged that Rand 500 billion (KSh3.3 trillion) had been looted. Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, also former Central Bank governor, took to Twitter to explain that the Sh3.3 trillion was the total Covid-19 relief fund distributed to many programmes, and it “has not been eaten” (his words). You can’t help but like Mboweni.

Yet, for all the corruption, we are only beginning to grapple with why Covid-19 relief funds and supplies are so sweet, so to speak. Obviously, first, the existential nature of coronavirus, meant that an incredible lot of money has been released. Many health ministries were all of a sudden dealing with amounts of money and resources they even didn’t imagine existed.

More than enough

A Health ministry bureaucrat who had only seen five face masks, all of a sudden faced with 500,000 donated by Jack Ma, will probably think “there is more than enough”, that if he stole 100,000 and sold them across the border where fellows are waiting with serious cash, there would still be sufficient quantities to go around.

However, for him or her or to so blatant, requires the second, and perhaps most critical, factor — a feeling that they would be not be held accountable. And that sense comes from the fact that the scale of the Covid-19 crisis, meant all the legalistic accountability controls and procedures were dismantled (or seemed like small-minded nit-picking) because there were countries to save from extinction at the hands of a virus.

The moneys and PPE were so much, and some of PPE donors so remote, they combined to create the impression in crooked minds that they belonged either to no one, or to an authority so high, it was impossible to fathom. It was akin to the president’s or king’s bribe.

If you are going to bride a president or king, you will walk in with your sack or suitcase of money (depending on the currency). However, you cannot count it in front of him, nor will the king count it in your presence — or even after you have left — because it is likely to a lot.

Now imagine you sent an emissary to State House with the bribe, and he handed it to the Big Man’s trusted private secretary. If the bribe is $1 million, and your emissary stole $150,000 and the president’s private secretary also stole $150,000 and handed him only $700,000, they will likely get away with. You are unlikely to call the president and ask him if he got the $1 million, if only because you know he is unlikely to have counted it. And, by the same token, he is unlikely to call you to ask how much you sent.

Covid-19 money and supplies are a little like that — like the king’s bribe.

Added to this, a few months ago it looked like we were all going to die. Tragically, many have. But most of us are still around. Inconveniently for the looters, now we are asking indignant survivors’ questions about the Covid-19 funds.

It’s likely this sense of peril, also fuelled some of the looting, and warped the morality of many. If the economy was going to collapse under coronavirus’ weight, and millions to perish, perhaps it felt like the right thing to rob for your family’s future.

If this story ended there, it would actually be a “good” one. We might even argue about if there might be a case here for “noble greed”, or “enlightened primitive accumulation”. The reality, unfortunately, is darker. For reasons ranging from our vexed politics, how power is gained and exercised, and the fundamental structures of our states, the gulf between the rulers, the State, and the people is so wide, that the two sides are, to all intents and purposes, in different countries.

The alienation is so deep, many an African state official’s encounter with the people is no different than Christopher Columbus’s with the native Americans in the 15th century.

In South Africa, with Africa’s highest (and world fifth top) cases of Covid-19, as health workers went without protective gear, PPE — where it had been bought - was being thrown in rivers and forests.

Fellows had been paid, officials had pocketed their cut, and they were just not willing to spend any money and time distributing or storing the PPE.

Those crooks and people, surely, cannot be of the same country or from the same universe.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3