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Here’s how you can be rich in Kenya without stealing

 Photo:Courtesy

Children in the 21st Century Kenya want to become ‘rich with lots of money’ when they grow up.

Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with dreaming of having lots of money.

Money is good, very good; it helps us navigate through life, make ends meet and most importantly, lead decent lives. But is it possible to make lots of ‘clean money’ in Kenya today through sheer hard work, discipline and commitment?

Although my answer to this question would be a big yes, most of my students in Ethics at the University are quick to answer ‘not in this Kenya’ and urge me to disembark from my utopian towers and smell the “real corruption coffee” that is too strong to wish away.

The problem is that in our increasingly money worshipping society, most of us are keen to amass as much material wealth as they can within the shortest time possible regardless of the means of acquisition.

And we, as a society, are always too quick to admire and even covet this overnight acquisition, while rubbishing moral progress.

We have become a society that treats with the least regard people of good character and treat with the highest esteem people who are devoid of virtues provided they have enough material wealth to warrant our standing ovation without caring where they sourced it from.

It is ironical that the more we craft good rules as illustrated by our Chapter Six in the new Constitution on leadership and integrity, the more we have bad people spending sleepless nights devising ways and means of violating these rules.

Everywhere you turn you are treated to enough moral drama and all these malpractices at virtually all levels of our society should serve as a wakeup call to all of us. It is time we became brutally honest with ourselves and admitted that the current crises are not rules based, but people based.

One will not become honest by being truthful only once in their life.

We only become honest by consistently and persistently being honest in all situations that call for our honesty long enough for this habit to become part of who we are. And so the same way it takes considerable time to learn both bad and good habits, so does it take time to unlearn them.

This in effect means we must make deliberate efforts to strive to rid ourselves and by implication our society of these bad habits/vices that have eaten at the core of who we are as a people. We need to change this narrative of easy quick fix pathways to material wealth and live a life of integrity in whatever we are engaged in.

We need to begin to give our children a reason to look up to people of character as their role models.

As it is now, our children’s role models seem to be the merchants of corruption who with impunity splash their ill-gotten gains shamelessly for all to see even as corruption cripples every sector of our society.

We as educators and ethicists keen on inculcating these good habits in our young people are at pains to explain to them how we can still preach to them about that “old fashioned cliché” that hard work and a life of integrity pays when all that they see around is the complete opposite.

They will soon accuse us, (if they are not already accusing us) of being the hypocrites. If all that they see and hear as they grow up is corruption and all these other malpractices around, then they are bound to turn out to be the same.

Although we live in an overwhelmingly rules-dominated world, it is only by having good people — virtuous people who are honest, disciplined, accountable, people of integrity, committed and responsible people that we will get out of the woods.

Our current good laws and rules are failing because they have become a challenge to bad people who are keen to find means of evading them.

And we seem to get it all wrong when we react by devising more stringent rules because it will only be a matter of time before these bad people devise more effective means to evade them too.

And the rat race continues. What we need to make the world a better place is not simply more ethical or legal rules, but more intrinsically good people.

For us to cope with these ethical challenges facing us as a society, we will have to do a major re-adjustment of our value systems to refocus our attention away from this over glorification of rampant materialism and consumerism. We will have to realise that character counts.

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