On Wednesday I came home to some sad news that my hen had accidentally fallen into some deep hole in the compound. I went to check up on it and the hen looked up at me helplessly with pity in its eyes hoping I could perform some sort of miracle. Sadly, I only managed to reciprocate the pity because there was nothing I could do given the depth of that hole.
I sluggishly walked away. However, my mind was busy thinking of a way on how to help it out. I didn’t have any ladder that could go that deep, the plants in the hole couldn’t support my weight and the supportive dig outs on the walls of the hole had filled up due to the long duration the hole had remained open. I concluded there was no way I could help this chicken out single handedly, however sad it was I just had to let it die in peace. I therefore went about taking care of my other domestic living creatures as usual.
After sometime, I went back to the hole to check up on the hen and my goodness! That hen’s desperation and desire to be free again had somehow made it fly up to some growing plant half the hole’s depth. The reduced distance brought up an idea in my mind, how about holding a ladder down to that level where the hen is now placed and wait for it to fly up supported by the ladder’s cross bars?
Actually that’s what happened and within some 30 minutes or so, it was out of that hole. A problem had been solved at last!
The hen in this story is the Kenyan people, the hole is corruption and the president is in my position. We are in a deep hole called corruption and no matter how much we try coming out of it we find ourselves unable and look up at the president with pity in our eyes hoping he can do anything and get us out. The problem with us is the fact that most of us are quite vocal in criticizing senior corrupt government officials but down here we still practice corruption only that it’s not in the news.
When a matatu conductor drops off some well folded ‘100-bob’ note on the road for a traffic officer to pick just because they have not adhered to the traffic laws, that’s corruption, when an officer in an office receives some ‘small soda or lunch’ as they call it, to effectively facilitate a given service that they are actually employed to do that’s corruption, when a small child expects to be ‘given something’ before they are sent or given chores, that’s breeding corruption, when a doctor attends to me first because we are friends even when there were others before me on the queue, that’s corruption, when a teacher gives preferential treatment to a pupil because the parents to the child are ‘big’ people or friends, that’s corruption, when procurement officers exaggerate costs in order to salvage something for their selfish gains, that’s corruption and so on and so forth.
We can’t expect the president to fight all this alone because he is not God and therefore not omnipresent. We might be very fast in pointing fingers at him but can he man all the traffic officers? Can he supervise all public officers? Definitely it’s not possible. We need to put in our best efforts towards fighting this vice from our end before the president can be able to come in and offer a supportive ladder to strengthen our efforts. He can’t get us out of this hole before we put in some effort and start the struggle upwards. It’s high time we stop blaming the president, let’s start by fighting this vice from within us, a tree is not cut from the flower or branches going down but rather from the stem upwards. You can only prune from up going down but that doesn’t eliminate the tree, it only trims and shapes it up. I look forward to a different Kenya that is in no hole called Corruption.
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