Empire-building in Kenya.

The Nitpicker, in this Monday's Business Daily, details the hardluck life of those who are unfortunate enough to come face to face with the forces of law and order in the transport sector, as we so eloquently describe it. The subtle intimidation to pay a bribe to the cop who accosts you for one traffic infraction or another. The not-subtle-anymore intimidation when you are detained and asked to post a cash bail. The sledgehammer of the judicial process when you attend court for your date with justice. The minutiae of dealing with the National Police Service, the Judiciary, the Kenya Prisons Service and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions are laid out in the Nitpicker's How traffic laws breed graft instead of ensuring safety and order on our roads, if you know what to look for.

Allow me to add to the discussion. I am told by parliamentary counsel (that is legislative drafters to you, dear reader) of a certain vintage that lawmaking in Kenya had a certain order to it, a certain logic that determined when a law was required. The questions that revolved around the necessity of a statute or a set of regulations formed what civil society operators now know as the policy environment. Difficult questions would be asked and persuasive answers would be found to address the questions. In the policy environment the answer was not always a new statute or an amending statute; sometimes a set of regulations or guidelines would suffice. The decision to pursue a particular course would only be made after a policy paper was prepared that took into account the complex, interlinked circumstances that gave rise to the problem eh policy was supposed to address. That order, that logic, it seems, is no more.

When the Second President discovered that he was on his way out, that the people were not really as grateful as two decades of sycophancy had led him to believe, he took his overbearing hand from the helm. Policy-making died in 1992/1993. National problems could be solved with a mix of ill-conceived legislation and corruption-fuelled ethno-jingoism. The wheels truly came of the bus during the spectacular ten years of the Third President's two terms. Statutes were enacted without rhyme or reason to address so many myriad problems that sometimes a law would be enacted to address something that another law was already addressing.

Many failed to see that the flurry of law-making hid empire building on a colossal scale. Once Moi's dead hand was finally yanked away from the levers of public administration, every permanent secretary worth his salt was busily and steadily building an empire of his own by establishing parastatals and other forms of government-owned entities which would draw from the Consolidated Fund and serve as, (a) retirement plans for the PSs and their cronies or as, (b) piggy banks for the inevitable political ambitions of the PSs. Soon enough the asleep-at-the-wheel members of the cabinet were not asleep any more and they got in on the racket. It was not long after that that our indefatigably avaricious parliamentarians decided that they wanted in on it too. And this is how we ended up with the National Transport Safety Authority (NTSA) and its penchant for enforcing obscure bits of the Traffic Act.

The NTSA came to life in a policy vacuum; the prima facie rationale for its establishment is sound. A deeper analysis of this rationale will inevitably point out that the benefits of the NTSA's existence will quite soon enough be eroded by its costs. In the current corruption-fuelled law-enforcement environment, it is only a matter of very little time before the NTSA joins the National Police Service's traffic officers and certain members of the Judiciary in the still growing ranks of the corrupt. The true reason for the establishment of the NTSA is to wangle out of the Consolidated Fund ever greater sums for which little oversight will be undertaken by the National Assembly. Past behaviour is a guide to future action. When it comes to billion-shilling allocations from the Consolidated Fund, there has always followed wild speculation with the funds, gross misuse and rife graft. The NTSA can publish its Vision, Mission and Core Values all it wants. That won't prevent it from becoming ever more the parasite that the traffic police are.