Wanted: President to lead in corruption war

A policeman points menacingly at a civil society activist during a past protest against runaway corruption in Nairobi. [File]

Younger Kenyans deserve a reminder about what we looked like in early 2003. The National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) had won the election in decisive fashion all the way from the presidency to Parliament. A Gallup poll rated us as the most optimistic people in the world.

Among promises for the first 100 days was a new constitution.  Citizens were exercising impressive civic action in carrying out police arrests at roadblocks.  Building on a donor-driven Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, a brilliant, homegrown Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation was in the works. 

At his inauguration, incoming President Kibaki had promised an end to “roadside declarations” and a focus on “zero tolerance to corruption”. Civil society took an impressive lead in pushing forwards new ethics and integrity and anti-corruption laws. One of its leaders, John Githongo, was appointed as Kenya’s anti-corruption chief. Then Anglo-Leasing and the shadowy “Anglo-Leasers” happened. And Kenya never recovered its anti-corruption momentum. 

From that point onwards, the anti-graft language changed.  In 2003, the conventional wisdom was that it was a political economy problem.  By the time we got to the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission that followed our tragic episode of post-election violence years later, it had come to be characterised as a legal problem.

Simply, we had reduced a moral and behavioural challenge to a question of procedure.  In a large sense, this is where Kenya sits today, occasionally impressed by judicial transactions with little thought for policy questions. Today’s Kenya accepts corruption as a cost of living.

Kenyan fait accompli

It comes as no surprise that Kenyans are obligingly cynical about any efforts to fight graft.  The unanswered top-down questions around the cost of the Standard Gauge Railway, the investment in Galana-Kulalu and the utility of our four Eurobonds represent the tip of the iceberg.

The devolved plunder going on in our counties is now par for the course.  The procurement shenanigans that infect and infest pretty most of our parastatal landscape is now normal; it is the done thing.  The daily and weekly reporting on financial infidelity that we get from the Auditor General suggests something between government, institutional or State collapse.

This is before we get to private sector, where corrupt acts are a means of business survival in the face of a predatory state.  We all know about the protection money that, say, pubs and restaurants, or jua kali business stalls, must add to their cost of sales in the face of official economic extortion from the vertically integrated transactional criminal enterprise whose public face is the police, or county officials.  In this national “free for all” we call Kenya, we do not get that nothing is ever actually free, or for everyone.

Of course, none of our putative presidential candidates, because the presidency is still Kenya’s political “Holy Grail”, has much to say about corruption in any substantive form.  Political victory requires mountains of cash – washed, cleaned and collected, but never honestly earned.  The total cost of the 2022 election, across all positions, looks like it will be anything between Sh600 billion and a trillion; equivalent at the top end to a third of our national budget or a tenth of the economy spent in one year. 

Maybe this is where Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) should be looking to grow its revenue take.

Focusing once again on the presidency, a simple question for our electoral marking scheme should be what sort of leader do we seek?  A national leader, in easy terms, has three basic tasks, as this column has suggested before.  Economy.  Security.  Governance.  As we think about our 5th, one might reflect on the notion that we have endured three securocrats and one econocrat. Might this be, with our impressive liberal constitution, the time to think about a governance and rule of law leader?  Hold that thought a bit.

What does a governance and rule of law leader look like? Three things might matter. First, implement the Constitution not as a political constraint or a legal instruction but as a policy inspiration.  There is a possible reading of katiba as a visionary problem-solving framework. 

Second, get that vertical devolution is Kenya’s future but this requires next-level thinking that reverses role and budget priority between counties and national government.  Third, and this President Kenyatta has started  through his Big Four Agenda, get Article 43 properly up and running.  One might also add the need to respect the horizontal separation of powers between the Executive as implementer, Legislature as law maker and Judiciary as the interpreter.

However, these are pretty general suggestions, so what about corruption? Building from my previous column, government essentially has four manifestations. First, as a “fixer” of “wicked” social policy problems as the fundamental expectation of progressive politics. Second, as an economic enabler driven by an inclusive progress and shared prosperity economic growth agenda. Third, as a fiscally-responsible manager of public finances for public good.  Fourth, as an efficient provider of public services to Kenyans as citizens with rights, not customers with needs.

If we consider these to be government’s essential public “goods”, then the way to fight graft is to consider their misrepresentations as public “bads”.  Thought about differently, there is a way to battle corruption without declaring civil and civic war on it. Let us unpack this notion beginning from the bottom.

On public service, Kenya has traditionally been a “House of Pain”.  However, Huduma Centres have significantly reduced this pain at a service delivery level. This less-painful experience needs to extend to eliminating the bribery that Kenyans encounter as they go about their daily lives. The Huduma Namba scheme, better conceptualised and implemented, might have helped here and could still do if the Executive gets that it needs to respect court orders.  KRA might have been laughing all the way to the bank. But it could have been bigger. A citizen-centric focus to governing changes our power relations.

Fiscal responsibility

Petty bribery has, in overall terms, as painful an impact on Kenyans as does poor public finance and economic management.  More focused and committed attention to citizen’s rights-based services begins to fix this.   However, Kenya’s second and third problems are theft of the budget; and hence the economy.

While early anti-corruption literature spoke to its immorality, the modern experience suggests that getting our Public Finance Management (PFM) working properly is equally responsible for our graft woes. This extends beyond Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) weaknesses; after all IFMIS is simply a collection of computer gadgetry; a tool. 

The real answer lies in the need for a real, not 3rd world, discipline that plans based on policy, budgets based on plans, spends according to budgets and accounts against these budgets.  One of the failures of the outgoing Jubilee administration has been to mutilate this discipline into an untidy mess currently referred to as “budgeted corruption”.

Disciplined PFM disciplines the economy.  But the economy is not just big business, or corporates. In Kenya, MSMEs run the daily show. So here is a fascinating twist. “Bottom-up economics” in a proper “pro-poor” sense might actually turn out to be Kenya’s ultimate “doing more with less” anti-corruption remedy. We start paying more tax.  We stop accepting shortcuts and truly own our taxes, and country.

War has not yet been declared but, by this stage, the anti-corruption battle is in full flow. One final challenge remains; policy and state capture. The short answer to this monstrosity is that it may not be fixed in 2022.  The longer answer, as hinted at in the previous column, resides in a “pro-markets” before “pro-business” economic agenda that will need massive behaviour change across all of Kenya’s officialdom.

This will require policy-led, not transaction-leaning, State and public officials not simply to understand concepts such as “pro-poor”, but to internalise the lived reality of our fabled “Wanjiku”.

To reside State power, as the Africog State Capture report notes, in national security and National Treasury is to deny the ordinary Kenyan inequality - reducing social, economic and political participation opportunity.  The longest answer is that it takes us to the old Greek thinking adage that poverty is the mother of revolution and crime.  There is no convoluted legal remedy for this state of play.

Governance and rule of law

Any prospective leader of Kenya who is not discussing corruption is playing games with Kenyans.  The question is not about political will; 10 years of a Jubilee Administration that seems to have made it worse in Kenyan minds is proof positive of that. 

The real question is which candidate gets that a governance and rule of law agenda is the first ask we have as Kenyans.  The second is that, once this is secured, please get the hell out of the way and leave us to our honest lives, living and livelihoods.  

-The writer is a management consultant and institutional reform specialist