Poor people more likely to pay bribes

Last week, a tiny classified advert in the Daily Nation set Kenyans on Twitter ablaze. It sat benignly, tucked in between adverts for tippers and gasoline water pumps, almost charming in its sincerity: “Join corruption cartels and win government supply tenders without sweat.”

There was a phone number to call, which was engaged the whole of Friday, the day the classified appeared. Those three lines seem to suggest that we are now in a strangely post-war-on-corruption dystopia, where the smoke and mirrors are gone, and corruption has been rehabilitated into an honest community effort, like a chama or a merry-go-round.