One day, corruption will kill us all.

Just like tuberculosis, pertussis, measles, pneumonia, malaria, the Spanish Flu and cirrhosis of the liver, corruption kills. That should be the tag-line of all anti-corruption campaigns. Corruption Kills. many Kenyans have been animated by the back-and-forth warriors of the Standard Gauge Railway tender. One side alleges, vociferously, that the tender is not a tender and that it is illegal. The other side says that it is not a tender but a government-to-government contract on very favourable terms to Kenya and that it is legal. Both might be right. Equally, both might be wrong. That is for the Mwalimu Matis, the John Githongos and the Maiai Kiais of the civil society industry to tell us.

Whether the Single Gauge Railway project has been corrupted by the raiders of the national coffers is neither here nor there; what is critical is to understand that Grand Corruption - the sort that gets the Matis, Githongos and Kiais out of bed in the morning - is fought on such a Grand Scale that its effects are never examined on the minutiae of day-to-day lives of the walking masses. When a mother-to-be gives birth in a public health facility and her infant dies upon birth because the maternity ward is under-manned because the funds for hiring extra nurses are unavailable because the national government overspent on Volkswagen Passat saloons because the public officers making the decision to purchase the Passat saloon were...(unaelewa?), you will not see Messrs Mati, Githongo or Kiai penning long Letters to the Editor explaining the link between the VW Passat tender and the death of an infant at the Nyeri District Hospital.

Take the knotty problem of public safety. We pretend that we are safe when we have surrounded our homes with eight-feet high walls, electrified fences, flood-lights, guard dogs, private security personnel and privately-owned firearms (whether licenced or not). We take defensive driving courses as a precaution for when we are not behind our home-stockades (surely we do not ride in hijack-prone Public Service Vehicles out of choice). We bemoan the lack of "police presence" on our streets and curse the extra expense of replacing the missing police with private security but we do not link the missing police to the black hole of the Black Budget allocated to "national security" and its associated elements.

We have a slight idea idea of how much the national government spends on capital development in national-security-related matters (you know, guns, bullets, body armour, Murungarus, and the like); but we are all at sea at why rank-and-file policemen (and women) live in hovels; why they do not receive the equivalent of hazard pay; and why they are the bane of the anti-corruption establishment while their bosses seem to trouser tens of millions every year from "investments" by them and their spouses. We do not need the same numbers of police on the streets as the United States or the United Kingdom do; what we need are police that are motivated to uphold the rule of law at all times. So, we do not pay the rank-and-file well; and their bosses are not punished for their "investments" even these are of quite dubious antecedents. Despite all this we are shocked - SHOCKED - when bribes are solicited and paid; when official firearms and uniforms are "rented;" when response times to crime scenes depend entirely on whether responding officers will be given "something to fuel their vehicles;" and there is a growing and lucrative partnership between the forces of law and order and elements of the criminal underground.

Corruption kills. And we are complicit in the deaths that corruption leaves in its wake. We go along to get along. We play the game as the corrupt want it to be played. We wring our hands and whinge piteously when things go wrong. But we do not take an active part in routing corruption; we are part of the corruption. Every day we watch silently as perjury is suborned, as bribes are paid, as "petty" rules are bent and broken, as unfairness is visited on us, as nurses sleep while infants die on birth, as anti-corruption czars are permitted to receive "gifts" in the course of their duties...we are complicit in the wave of corruption that has engulfed this country like an epidemic. One day, corruption will kill us all.