Leaders owe Kenyans more imagination than just theft

This week Kenyans were treated to yet another corruption scandal. This time it was Kilifi County, where more than Sh1.8b may have been stolen. Like with the myriad corruption scandals, Kilifi’s revealed a web of collusion involving senior officials in key institutions – from the county government to the Central Bank to commercial banks. In other words, corruption in Kenya is not and has never been the preserve of a few rotten tomatoes. It is systemic. It is aided and abetted by key institutions of state.

Kenyans are outraged. As they should. Stealing about 15 per cent of the budget from a poor county like Kilifi is not just criminal. It leads to deaths. It means fewer Kenyans have a shot at a better life because our elites have refused to work hard for their wealth, instead preferring to steal to live. My guess is the money did not go into developing Kilifi. It probably went into the purchase of some gaudy property in Nairobi or Mombasa. And into crass consumption – of the kind we are used to among Kenya’s nouveau riche. Instead of generating development either in Kilifi or Nairobi or Mombasa, the money only created a whole lot of poor rich people. People who are rich now but who would revert to living hand-to-mouth the second the corruption taps are closed.

Herein lies our problem. As a country, we have an elite class that lacks an encompassing interest in the general betterment of Kenya. Instead of leaders, we have short-sighted thieves with little ambition.

To make this point, let me give you the example of Leland Stanford, the man who founded the prestigious Stanford University in California. Having grown up in a wealthy New York family in the early 1800s, Stanford began his move westwards in search of even more wealth – first moving to Wisconsin then California. Through hook and crook, by 1856 Stanford found himself as one of the four foremost businessmen in Sacramento, the state capital of California. His main investment was in railway business. Stanford would soon become one of the more famous barons in what was the Gilded Age in America, when business leaders sought to build conglomerates with significant monopoly power and had no qualms engaging in corruption – buying off politicians, diluting shareholder value and influence, and inflating government contracts.

In short, Stanford and his peers such as John Piedmont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D Rockefeller were not particularly scrupulous individuals. They lived in a period when everyone wanted to get rich, fast. And when the state was not strong enough to limit excesses of a rapacious elite. In other words, the American gilded age was not unlike what we have now in Kenya.

But there is one big difference. In America, the barons invested in building business empires that created jobs and generated significant amounts of tax revenue. In Kenya our elites primarily invest in consumption. American barons wanted to live forever, and so created lasting organisations – they founded or endowed universities, they built business behemoths, they were frugal in their personal lives. In Kenya we have navel-gazing thieves, who steal to consume and have no inkling of what it takes to build legitimate job creating businesses that will outlast their natural lives.

The American Gilded Age gave Americans universities such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Vanderbilt. Our Kula Nyama Age is producing nothing but ill-designed apartment blocks and ugly hotels.

The point here is not to provide a hagiographic account of these American barons. Rather, it is to remind us that at a practical level, we can do things differently. It is a reminder to our elites that there is more to life than crass consumption and owning stolen land. That they owe us a lot more than they have been giving us. That they need to be a little bit more imaginative in life.