Let us crucify graft: We may save our nation and children from ourselves

Catholic Archbishop Philip Anyolo leads faithful in the 'Way of Cross ' walk along Parliament Nairobi road, Nairobi. March 29th,2024 (Elvis Ogina, Standard)

In a country where patriotism and decorum pervades the conduct of public affairs, this article today would have been dedicated to the great story of crucifixion. This is especially so in a country that is led by Bible lifting leaders and whose millions of citizenry troop to places of worship every Friday, Saturday or Sunday without fail, depending on one's religious beliefs.

Furthermore, this is not only a Holy weekend for Christians, but also coincides with the Holy month for Muslims that is dedicated to prayer and fasting. Tying this to official statistics, 86 per cent of the population confess the Christian faith while 11 per cent are Muslims. The Hindus, traditionalists and atheists only account for about 3 per cent of the population.

Yet, we enter the Holy weekend with data from the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC)showing that the value of bribes to access essential public services has almost doubled over the past two years. One may be tempted to wonder if this is in response to the high cost of living, taxes or it is demand driven by the new administration.

While top insiders in the Kenya Kwanza administration are on record publicly confessing they never campaigned on an anti-corruption crusade; one would have expected that common wisdom dictates they rein in on the vice if it's true they found empty coffers and are as visionary as they want the nation to believe.

However, the warning signs have always been there. Prosecution of high-profile corruption cases for people associated with the regime started collapsing like dominos as soon as they assumed office. As if giving cue on things to come, suspects have been lined up for or appointed into bigger offices in the administration.

The veil of the contradictions is that the rhetoric against corruption has rather been elevated at State House, but with little or nothing to show on the ground if EACC's report is to be believed.

At State House this week, the President lamented the plunder and waste of public resources happening in state corporations. But what else to expect by flooding such agencies with political rejects and loyalists at the expense of competency and in the name of rewarding shareholding in his political empire?

It thus must not come as a surprise when the Cabinet Secretary for finance says data at the Treasury indicates that the return on investment in such state enterprises is a paltry 0.13 per cent out of sh.5.7 trillion invested in them.

When Paolo Mauro wrote his seminal paper on "Why worry about Corruption" in 1997, published by the International Monetary Fund, he must have had the present day Kenya in mind. A graduate of Oxford University and a PhD from Havard, he then was working as an Economist in the Fund's European department.

In economic lingua, corruption is referred to as rent-seeking. In his paper, Paolo argues that corruption is notoriously hard to measure empirically because of its clandestine nature. Nonetheless, its negative consequences are traceable within the economy and its causes well understood in economic literature.

According to this paper, much of public corruption is traceable to government interventions in the economy. Common government interventions in the economy that act as catalysts for corruption include pervasive government regulations, subsidies, price controls and multiple exchange rates. Other factors would include low wages in the civil service, natural resource endowments and sociological factors such as societal divisions along ethnic or linguistic lines.

Coming home, do these factors ring a bell? The chaos in our energy sector is largely attributable to government regulatory and price controls. Think of the cost of electricity bills, the collapsed government-to-government oil deal and the billions that exchange hands behind the scenes. But before you get lost in that, think of the ongoing fertilizer scam, recent cooking oil scams and Jubilee's petroleum subsidies that sunk billions of taxpayers' money into a bottomless pit owned by shadowy merchants.

Tracing all multi-billion corruption scandals in our economic history, they all gravitate around subsidies on major consumer goods including maize, sugar, cooking oil, wheat, rice, fertilizer and other farm inputs. Of course, we would all be aware of the shareholding in the current administration that dictates appointments into strategic public offices, as conduits to facilitate rent-seeking for political and bureaucratic elites.

The consequences of this rent-seeking are far-reaching. For starters, investors see economic rents as a tax and discourages their willingness to invest in a corrupt economy. Government loses tax revenues through tax evasion and expenditure leakages, affecting budgetary implementation, procurement corruption leads to poor quality infrastructure and public services and distorts the composition of government expenditure. Connect this with the KK administration's pre-occupation with housing contracts, while it does seem to bother on the paralysis in health facilities and threats from schools due to lack of funding. It all boils down to opportunities for rent-seeking!

Further, www.investopedia.com documents other costs of corruption to include high prices for low-quality goods due to deal-making and lucrative public contracts going to quacks; inefficient allocation of resources due to tender-preneurship; uneven distribution of wealth because of a disproportionately small middle class and significant divergence between upper and lower income classes in the economy; and low stimulus for innovation because corrupt legal systems cannot guarantee property rights.

Other consequences are the existence of a shadow economy since small businesses fail to register to evade taxes (see our hugely informal sector); and low investment and trade because corruption acts as a disincentive to Foreign Direct Investments. A separate IMF working paper established that corruption has a long-term adverse impacts on the quality of education and healthcare.

For instance, it is very easy for anyone to see the connection between examination cheating, fake academic certificates and quacks in our learning institutions and health facilities. It also does not require rocket science to see the connection between bribes during police recruitment and the corruption among the ranks of the police service, law enforcement, investigative failures, road traffic service menace, hiring of weapons to criminals and facilitation of terrorists to access crucial identification documents.

This pervasive behaviour and mediocrity is also easily traceable in the provision of other basic public services like the immigration and registration of services among others. How can people who paid bribes to get public appointments be expected to offer services without seeking bribes themselves? How can individuals whose main qualification for appointment into a public office was political connection or knowing a tall uncle in government bureaucracy be expected to be competent and diligent in doing their job?

More poignantly, how can politicians who openly bribed to win elections be expected to execute their executive and legislative responsibilities judiciously and ethically? How can people who stole elections and used fake academic papers be expected to oversight public money in our legislative houses?

Why are high-profile corruption cases never prosecuted to their logical conclusion? Something tells me the reason why KK political elites are treating Kenyans with such contempt over their misinformed programs and tax policies is because they think and believe they can corrupt their way back into office during the next general election.

World Bank estimates that the average income in countries with high levels of corruption is about one-third (1/3) of that of countries with low levels of corruption. Further, infant mortality rate in such countries is about three times higher while literacy rate is about 25 per cent lower. Doesn't this then behoove each one of us to take our corruption configuration to the Cross this Holy weekend and seek atonement for our wickedness?