Original sins that haunt our efforts to end graft, greed

According to newly leaked information, more than one per cent of Kenya’s wealth is held in secret accounts in Switzerland. The staggering Sh64 billion, according to Swiss Leaks, belongs to politicians and business people. This is not necessarily breaking news. At the dawn of the Narc government, a firm by the name, Kroll associates, was tasked to follow up on Kenya’s wealth stashed in Zurich and other tax havens of the west. Now, I have no idea what became of such efforts.

The Swiss Leaks come even before the dust settles on revelations of massive graft and wastage at both levels of government. There has been hue and cry over wheelbarrows going for Sh109,000. If you go to a Kariobangi junkyard today, you can buy a salvage Nissan B12, or even a salvage Toyota AE90 at the price of one Bungoma wheelbarrow. Then you can have it panel-beaten back into fairly good shape and you join thousands of other Nairobians polluting the environment in creaky contraptions they have the cheek to call cars, but I digress.

And if you thought it is a vice to while time away on social media, in some counties, Facebook consultants are smiling all the way to the bank. We have also heard of gates that cost millions of shillings. But the Facebook-gate scandals are child’s play compared to the billions that vanish into thin air every week, courtesy of crooked fellows in the national government. Today a top official wakes up in a oh-so-heroic mood and claims to have detected a scandal before funds could be stolen. Tomorrow the mood changes as they admit that some cash was actually stolen. It leaves you in the unenviable position of Alice going down the rabbit hole in Wonderland.

But, why, one wonders, are we so ravenous? If a man steals cash to build a house and take his children to school, though I don’t support it, it is a bit understandable. Where I come from, no one put you in a hollowed-tree-trunk beehive, covered it with dry banana leaves, set it alight before rolling it downhill as they did with thieves. A man was allowed to help himself to a bunch of bananas on anyone’s farm so long as it was just enough to keep him from starving. Not so today, when even billionaires are still stealing more billions of shillings as millions of their countrymen sink deeper into destitution.

Where did this culture come from? I’m told shortly after independence, and many years hence, those who ascended to plum positions got busy amassing wealth at a scale that would see many generations of their progeny breezing through life in luxury. Their children’s friends, many of who came from poor backgrounds, grew up green with envy. They worked hard in school with the hope one day they would also afford the lifestyles of the old-money families. Once they graduated from the best schools and universities across the world, these children of the poor discovered that no honest pay for honest work could afford them the lifestyles of their rich peers, who did not have to do anything anyway.

When it comes to vying for political office, or even for a potential mistress, old money had eternal upper hand. I need not spell it out for you how the human urge to compete and win has led us to where we are. Even as we complain about the wage bill, the original sin was committed when MPs’ first order of business was to increase their salaries. We all know the story of their allowances. I guess it is why the parking attendants tell you, instead of paying Sh300, you can give them Sh100 and you are covered.