President Uhuru Kenyatta must end the culture of theft in government, public institutions

NAIROBI: Evangelical churches in Kenya have announced their intent to launch a national transformation campaign. This is timely. Kenya needs this kind of jab in the arm.

 

Alarmed by the decay in government and public service, the Evangelicals have asked President Kenyatta to stop paying lip service to the war against corruption and pounce, for once. But they will not just sit back and wait for the President to act. They have promised to swing into action. They want corrupt leaders sacked, taken to court and jailed. They also want the decadence in the National and County Governments to end.

The assignment is mammoth. For the public service is sick. It is a wasteland of greed, incompetence and self-service. The top brass is populated by individuals ill prepared for the assignments in their docket. Where they are not incompetent, they are outright thieves. Sometimes they are both. Consider that the Speaker of a County Assembly can say on national television, “The people of this county does not know.” An elected member of the same assembly says, “If you are eating a bread . . .” Intellectual flotsam and jetsam has wormed its way into power, courtesy of allowing ourselves to be sidetracked into tribal blind alleys.

Ethnic fish trawlers have rewarded us with stultifying parodies in bloated institutions. The only reason these individuals occupy high office is that they are in the right books with the ethnic kingpin. Astute individuals who cannot worship the big man will never get anywhere within a whiff of leadership, not even if they are from the right tribe. And so we “eat a bread” in the County Assembly and the people of the same county “doesn’t know . . .”

The quality of debate and public discourse is sickening and the focus fatally flawed. In the place of oracy we have deafening ethnic gabble. In the place of Aristotelian rhetoric is barefaced dishonesty. We believe in nothing, hold nothing sacrosanct, except chasing after the wind of “making it.” By this is meant primitive accumulation of the trappings of “the good life.”

The church has its job cut out. For, the nation is in urgent need for moral and ethical rearmament. The newly employed youth wants to own a home in the same neighbourhood as the boss. He wants to drive a car of the same make and frequent the same social places. The outcome is theft by servant. The Kenyan national ethos is, “You steal where you work.” To work and steal in the most enviable place, you must play the sycophant and draw the tribal leader’s attention. Transforming us is truly herculean.

Government is about what you can get out of it. Hence the presidency cannot make up its mind on public appointments. We hear that there is a deadlock at the top over what are considered “lucrative ministries.” The top cannot agree on which “lucrative office” should go to whose nominees. You don’t need the wise old man of Usumbura to tell you why.

Now we are culturing decadence in institutions of learning. The leader of tomorrow is being prepared to be an omnivorous eater of what does not belong to him. The credo is shifting from future leaders to future stealers. The student has no appetite for knowledge. His only desire is to “pass the exam.” He must pass on an empty head and a full stomach. The only relevant teacher, therefore, is she who brings the stolen exam to the “revision” class. And it must come with the marking scheme. This has not rattled President Kenyatta or his appointees and assignees in the Ministry of Education. What is in the fibre of such a certificate?

Hopefully the Evangelical churches could help us out of this muddle. The traditional churches seem to have either surrendered or got sucked in. They have suffered spiritual stagnation, infiltration by the State and doctrinal unorthodoxy. They seem to bow before the State instead of kneeling before Jesus Christ. The Evangelicals have of course not also been free of these vices.

Lost in the mire, too, is the academy. It is preoccupied with its own private wars. In the universities, personal and ethnic interests have diverted focus from academic research and teaching. Where the university should be an intellectual moral and ethical compass, it is now a forest for latter-day omnivorous hunter-gatherers. It is at once a tribal den and a caricature of higher learning.

The University of Nairobi has previously been a beacon of hope, the home of excellence in research and learning. Today, it is suffocating under greed and ethnicity. Officials retire with one leg and want to run the institution from outside on the second leg. The pie is too sweet to be surrendered. A senior official who has just retired is not ashamed to demand – not even request but demand – at a graduation parade that he should be left to “supervise” ongoing (lucrative) construction works at no fee. You would imagine that he was in the social league. Because of this, the fountain of knowledge is perpetually in the press for all the wrong reasons. The new administration has no time to settle down to work, because of what can only be described as unfinished business from the past.

If this text reads like the Armageddon it is because this is where we have reached. It is unacceptable that public office should be a gravy train. Unfortunately the present government has legitimised this perspective. The time has come for President Kenyatta to recognise that he is the President of Kenya for the next two and a half years. He must end the culture of theft in government and public institutions. For a start, he must completely reconstitute his government. He must sack people, jail some and bring in entirely fresh blood. He does not need permission from anybody – not even from the Deputy President. His first mistake was to make the DP imagine he was also some sort of President. He is not. The final verdict on this government will be about Kenyatta and not William Ruto.

By the same token, the President must clamp down on the malady in the rest of the public institutions. It is scandalous that someone who has retired from an institution should drag it down due to selfish interests – complete with hirelings from inside – and we all seem unable to do anything about it. We don’t have to wait for Pastor Mark Njoroge and the Evangelicals to correct this.

On a more positive note, wise counsel eventually prevailed at Egerton University. The ethnic and financial machinations that threatened to bedevil the appointment of the vice chancellor (VC) were defeated. Prof Rose Mwonya, a meritorious scholar and career administrator in education, is the new VC. Her history with Egerton goes back to its pre-university years. Hopefully she will be afforded the space to work without the kind of drawbacks Prof Peter Mbithi has had at the University of Nairobi. Universities should be left alone to mould leaders we can believe in.