Our grand future.

There is something slimy about a person who tattle-tells on his friends, especially when they have made a bargain to keep each others' confidences. A sneak who would record his friends' intimate confessions and then broadcast it to the narc's is worse than a rat. There is no way the business of the National Assembly will go back to business-as-usual after the revelations regarding the Parliamentary Accounts Committee are dealt with, one way or the other.

I don't know why people didn't see this one coming after what John Githongo put Mwai Kibaki's government through, especially as revealed by Michela Wong in It's Our Turn To Eat. Since those halcyon days, the technology has gotten better, and the sneaks have gotten sneakier. No one is beyond the reach of the sneak. Your position does not protect you from the sneak. Soon enough Parliament will ban all cellphones from its premises; they have become way too smart for the comforts of the lawmaking class, as wayward lawmakers are discovering to their grief the world over.

Is this the end of the Kenyan Age of Innocence regarding our government? We have always suspected without hard proof that it is riddled through with corruption and corrupt beings. Until John Githongo made his explosive revelations - revelations that reverberate till this day - we always assumed that the grandly corrupt were a few very bad apples in bushels of moderately bad apples. 

Even after Ministers and Permanent Secretaries resigned, we were not seriously concerned about the corruption of the State. Even when lawmakers were caught taking handouts to ask questions in Parliament, we didn't think it was a crisis. Even when heard about lawmakers and ministers conspiring to profit from desperately hungry or homeless Kenyans, we let it slide; exceptional situations were a recipe for graft, we whispered to ourselves. The PAC revelations are finally the cause for the last scales to fall from our eyes. Kenyans can no longer pretend that they have a government they can be proud of.

The only person who seems to be sure of the direction he must take, ironically, is the President. Unless one is blind, our President's failings do not include a penchant for grand five-fingered discounts. He is truly the only one not on the take. He is the only one truly frustrated by the anti-graft efforts of his government. His anguish is palpably clear every time he is forced to confront the networks that have made such a grand comeback in his government. He can't fight them on multiple fronts. If Justin Muturi and Ekwe Ethuro will not be his partners in Parliament or Willy Mutunga in the Judiciary, I don't know to who the President will turn to win the war, because we, the people, have our own problems to deal with.

We are now confronted with the same spectre that haunts the President. We can no longer casually swat the fly away; it has become a swarm and we are its target. Lawmakers are accused of engaging in such flagrantly corrupt acts it is a wonder they even get to enact any laws. If we truly lose Parliament to corruption, it will be a short hop to Nigerian-style civil chaos. Our al Shabaab problem will become something along the lines of Nigeria's Boko Haram's problem. That is what we can look forward to if we keep turning a blind eye to every failing of Parliament.