Ruto's fate should befall many leaders indicted by Parliament

By Kamotho Waiganjo

If there was respect for the law, Mr William Ruto would never have needed to be suspended from Cabinet, as he would never been a member thereof. The law that required his suspension was enacted long before the new Constitution came into force.

But to be fair the Eldoret North MP, he is only one among equals, there are numerous political leaders and senior civil servants against whom there are credible allegations of graft.

The significant difference between Ruto and the other suspects is that he had the misfortune of being charged in court, principally because at the time he was taken to court, he was a member of the vanquished Kanu administration. When it was no longer expedient to exterminate Kanu, Ruto found himself in Cabinet, with ODM rewarding his delivery of the Kalenjin vote with a senior Cabinet position. Yet the graft case was still outstanding and the law prohibiting such appointments was still in force. But one’s luck can only hold for so long, and his day of reckoning finally arrived last week.

Will a similar fate befall the many Kenyan leaders, who have been serially indicted by the PIC and PAC into the graft roll of honour? Doubtful. What keeps many of these men and women from the sack is their political value; not the nature of the case against them.

For this reason the sceptical me approaches dramas like the ongoing Wetang’ula saga with significant cynicism, my focus is not on the merit or otherwise of the graft allegations but the minister’s value in Kenya’s politics.

If his political share value is high, it will not matter whether or not Kenya ended up surrendering a plot on Tokyo’s State House Road for a shamba in Ruai. He will not only survive, he will thrive. Woe unto him if his stock is bearish.

This can be woefully depressing. Fortunately it is only half the story. Kenya boasts of sufficient men and women of goodwill, including many who sit in Parliament and even Cabinet, who know that unless we deal with misuse of public resources ruthlessly, something will happen.

They know that theft of public funds causes untold misery on the citizenry. It denies millions of children access to life saving medicine, nursing mothers from clean water and all of us from credible security. In a country with an increasingly informed citizenry this is a disaster waiting to happen.

To ensure that this disaster does not explode, an early instalment on the new Constitution would be a commitment by parliamentarians of goodwill, and they are many, to ignore politics, censure those against whom there are credible graft cases but also dig out old PIC/PAC reports, publicise the roll of dishonour and chase offenders out of public office.

To the President and Prime Minister, this is a fight you must lead from the front, your legacy, currently so bright courtesy of the new Constitution, will be severely tarnished if you don’t act brutally to rid the political sector of even the whimper of corruption.

—The writer is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya