On graft, look at the mirror, then overhaul our character

By Henry Munene

Long ago when animals could talk, hyena’s bad manners distinguished it as the symbol of laziness, greed and foolishness. Hyena could escort you home, all the time keeping to the bushes and drooling in the vain hope that your hand - judging by the way it swung back and forth - would finally fall off and afford it some sumptuous supper.

Our people also say hyena walks with a limp and has shorter hind legs after allegedly falling from the skies where he is alleged to have greedily followed a bunch of crows for a feast.

To be fair to the widely defamed animal, our people say for all its greed, the hyena never ate its children, unlike we humans who, after years of civilisation have come to exhibit a form of greed that makes the spotted scavenger look like a paragon of purity. So much that Tanzania’s Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, he of the Ujamaa fame, declared ours as a man-eat-man society.

Look at our proclivity for taking and giving bribes, and sometimes endangering many lives in the process. For the last few days, the police have been engaged in a major operation to flush out terrorists across the country.

In the ensuing blame game, fingers are pointing to corruption. Those who know are saying that most Al Shabaab adherents gain entry into the country with the complicity of law enforcers and immigration officials.

We may have allowed so many illegal immigrants into the country. So much that it is being whispered if we were to carry out census, and compare our current population to the numbers recorded at various maternity hospitals, we would end up with the same answer as the one on who won the 2007 presidential election.

And today I will not sit here and direct our hypocrisy to the police and immigration officers, rotten as they may be. Kenyans need to look at the ugly (wo)man in the mirror. Let us admit it. We have over the years graduated from hypocrisy and corruption to worshipping ill-gotten wealth. So now we find it easier to pass the buck to politicians, the police and other public officials and go on as if we are from Planet Jupiter, even fall over one another striving for the wind of overnight windfalls.

Everyone, from the so-called Wanjiku to the pius civil society groups must go back and search the dark crevices of our souls. We seethe with righteous anger at the police and building inspectors whenever a poorly constructed building collapses or a road crash claims lives. We froth to no end over road carnage but still drink a crate of beer before driving to  shags.

We are never remorseful for breaking the law in our mad rush to get rich overnight, and are forever ready to bribe everyone along the way.

Look at our education system.  Cheating and cancelled results have become a whole category in exam results ranking. We even have primary schools made up of a few handpicked ‘repeaters’ who cheat their way to the top 100 schools, after which we are ready to pay an arm and a leg to cram all our children there so that we can eventually celebrate when their schools pass with flying colours, through sleight-of-hand  tactics.

Look at our elections. We have parties that cannot conduct primaries lecturing us on poll propriety. And with the recent expose on the 2013 poll irregularities and the pogrom that followed the 2007 exercise, do we need to look any further to know we are a society in dire need of re-examining our values?

With the government in tender scandals, the Opposition in tatters and NGOs that write proposals to carry out humanitarian work before redirecting donor cash to sin joints suburbs and shopping binges abroad, who will save Wanjiku and Atieno?

Yes, Atieno and Wanjiku need to be saved from her penchant of electing bad leaders to office after pocketing Sh50 notes and drinking cheap drinks during campaigns? Wanjiku and Atieno also seem hell-bent on breaking every law to join the league of the eating chiefs, by hook or crook. No, we need to apologise to the hyena. At least it never devours its children.

The writer is Revise Editor at The Standard