Why fight against corruption is a facade

The fight against corruption, assuming there was one in the first place, is already lost.

Lately, there has been a bevy of bad jokes from the Executive. President Uhuru Kenyatta’s directive that all procurement officers undergo a polygraph test elicited such swift rejoinders, most unflattering to him and his besieged deputy, he must have balked at the venom. Clearly, the directive was issued on the spur of the moment without consideration of its implications, and so is the call for lifestyle audit exercise.

One has to be truly naive to believe that any audit on the President, his deputy and the real wielders of power would be gullible enough to disclose anything negative about themselves in a country where a nondescript salonist admits to carrying stolen money from NYS in sacks and walks free.

And that is because our investigative arm of the police is pathetically inept, or so threatened by the ‘high ups’ its existence is merely to fulfil a constitutional requirement. What’s more, wealth is movable, hence concealable. Veritably, Kenya is the original abode of sacred cows, a breed we have by the thousands in our midst, accounting for the sorry state the country perpetually finds itself in.

The fight against corruption, assuming there was one in the first place, is already lost. From the raving, particularly by legislators from Deputy President William Ruto’s backyard, it is easy to conclude there is an unholy secret right inside Jubilee whose details no one is really keen on having get out into the public domain. The bad guys are all in there and are threatening to expose one another to the public.

Loquacious Nandi Senator Samson Cherargei and Elgeyo Marakwet Senator Kipchumba Murkomen keep making reference to a government within a government that is not favourably disposed to Ruto. 

With Muhoho Kenyatta’s name on one of the lists of sugar importers, Rift Valley legislators have a slight edge over their anti-Ruto central Kenya wing, but the war has not even been defined. What we are having is a rattling of the drums of war for combatants to prime themselves.

Too deep

Tellingly, Fred Matiang’i, the Cabinet secretary for Internal Security, began the probe on contraband sugar laced with poisonous metals with a blitzkrieg. But if claims by some legislators that he has been deliberating avoiding to face a parliamentary committee, having discovered those involved in the sugar scam  are true, the inference is that Matiang’i ventured too deep into the inner sanctum and got admonished for it. Like an envelope, Matiang’i must lie low and let the storm pass.

Either way, unscrupulous individuals on both sides of a wrangling Jubilee have been out to kill our agricultural sector, and by Jove, have they succeeded! Farmers in the Rift Valley are a desolate lot, not just because returns on their input have dwindled after government failed to pay them well for their cereals, individuals after super profits provided them with substandard fertilizer. It impacted negatively on their crops. And, perhaps by design, while the National Cereals and Produce Board procrastinated in buying the cereals, it encouraged middle men to exploit the farmers by buying their maize at throwaway prices only to re-sale to NCPB at super profits.

The once thriving sugar industry in Western Kenya is practically dead. The very uncaring government that presided over its demise by issuing sugar import licenses to hundreds of well-connected individuals has never shied from shedding crocodile tears.

To assuage jittery cane farmers in the Mumias sugar zone, the government gave a perfunctory undertaking to bail out Mumias Sugar Company at a cost of Sh5 billion in 2016.

This belated war on contraband sugar, if not just a façade, signifies fallout among the bad guys who would rather see millions of Kenyans labour under cancers brought on by the condemned sugar as long as their bank accounts stay obese

Tip offs

The rate and frequency of discovery of contraband sugar in warehouses spread across the country is not indicative of the superior investigative powers of the police, rather, the police are benefiting from tip offs in the gang war that the March 9, 2018 handshake between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga precipitated. The police, the Kenya Bureau of Standards and the Customs department are complicit in all the shady deals.

It is inconceivable that the hundreds of thousands of bags of uncertified sugar can get into the country without all these institutions getting wind of it. Indeed, KEBS has been too clever by half if the claim that it has been manufacturing fake quality labels from within its premises is verified.

It does not help that the Managing Director of KEBS was arrested in connection with the entry of contraband fertilizer into the country. By mere association, that tells you how the very people charged with ensuring safety for Kenyans are the ones that feed them on poison in the name of making profits.

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The [email protected]