The war on graft in high places was always going to be a tough one — and that is why President Uhuru Kenyatta's direct intervention was essential in ensuring significant headway is made on this front.
And the President's anti-corruption crusade will succeed or fail in the hands of two constitutional offices — the office of the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission (EACC) and the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). As things stand today, the obvious lack of harmonised communication from the two offices on ongoing investigations point to institutional friction.
The matter is made more worrisome by the fact that officials from both offices are involved in the investigations. The natural expectation would therefore be that the communication emanating from any of the offices, especially on investigations on alleged corruption against top government officials, would reflect a shared view of the other office.
But that is not the case. On Friday, the EACC announced in a press statement that it had recommended that files of cases targeting three Cabinet Secretaries, Mr Davis Chirchir (Energy), Mr Felix Koskei (Agriculture) and Mr Michael Kamau (Transport), and several other senior government officials be closed for lack of evidence.
Other senior officials whose investigation files the EACC wants terminated are Narok Governor Samuel Tunai and Nairobi Senator Mike Mbuvi. But even before the ink had dried on the paper communicating the EACC position, the DPP released a statement explaining that his office would first peruse the files and make an independent decision on way forward.
The two statements are unfortunate in many respects. First, it is demonstration that these independent state agencies are not reading from the same script even when it has publicly been stated that officers are working together on the files in question. Under the law, the EACC is mandated to investigate corruption and make prosecutorial recommendation to the office of the DPP.
On the other hand, the office of the DPP is required to assess the evidence and determine if it can sustain a case against the suspects. By inviting the public into their opposing positions on files they are handling together, the two agencies are guilty of eroding public confidence in the government's new drive to tackle corruption. And when public confidence is eroded, criminals are the victors as the attention of the investigators and prosecutors is diverted to meaningless grandstanding and territorial battles.
Public confidence in the war on corruption is critical if meaningful progress is to be made. Should there be any suspicion that the government is not committed to containing graft, the inclination to offer and receive bribes will remain pervasive.
Already, there is talk that the government is paying lip service to the war on graft and it is targeting of high level officials in a public relations exercise to earn public goodwill. These perceptions should not be fuelled by ill-thought out actions of state agencies. It gets worse when even those in the Jubilee ruling coalition demonstrate their lack of faith in the anti-corruption drive. Only last week, Jubilee's National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale stated in public that members of the two state agencies — the EACC and the DPP's office — had been compromised and were deliberately letting off the hook high profile individuals in the so-called list of shame. That such a statement should come from a senior figure of the Jubilee government is a telling indictment on the kind of support these state agencies get from top echelons of government.
The war on corruption suffered a terrible body blow when the three tenured commissioners of the EACC — Mr Mumo Matemu, Ms Irene Keino and Prof Jane Onsogo — quit at the height of the investigations following sustained, and some may argue, ill-advised pressure from the Executive.
Whether or not the EACC, with its state-hired officers, will be able to convince the court of public opinion that it can independently conduct investigations without undue pressure from the Executive is not for us to judge. But we must state unequivocally that those actions that undermine the war on corruption must stop if this war is ever to be won.
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