PR and lipstick on pigs.

A few years ago a partnership I am familiar with was swindled of a tidy sum. The partners did not take it lying down. They knew the swindler and, crucially, where he banked. They had contacts at the swindler's bank and pretty soon enough they had the swindler's bank statements. While I can understand what motivated the partners to the collection of that kind of intelligence on their quarry, it is also the principal reason why I have absolute no faith in the integrity of the cashless systems being sold to me by every company and its uncle.

I do not trust my telecom company. I love exploiting its money-transfer platform for many transactions, but I will absolutely not link that platform to my bank account. When I am solicited by criminal elements in Kamiti GK Prison over one successful lottery or the other, the only institution that could have handed them my personal details is my telecom company. So until it puts and end to these kinds of solicitations, I will not trust my telecom company.

I do not trust my bank either. Someone in my bank permitted a transaction on my VISA card without my permission for a sum I have never spent in a single day. My bank played hardball about recovering my lost funds. I pushed back. It eventually bent. Now it says it will have my money back in my account in forty-five working days.

All the public relations in the world about how my telco and my bank have all these corporate social responsibility programmes wiping away jiggers in Nyeri or planting trees in Mbooni or buying sanitary pads in Baringo will not make me trust them any time soon. They play fast and loose with my personal information. They put me at added risk of swindling by sophisticated criminals. But they are not sorry. They have done precious little to mitigate my risks or prevent them from occurring. My trust is the last thing they should expect.

No matter how shiny a new toy feels, in Kenya it always comes with strings attached. Whether it is a constitutional arrangement, a money transfer service, an insurance or banking product, an FM radio station, a newspaper, a highway, a railway, a port, a university or a religious organisation, the sheen wears off pretty fast, the rats come out of the woodwork, and I am left with my hand on my wallet attempting to keep it safe from all these new hyenas.

Someone asked me to reflect on the authentic meaning of public relations after I wisecracked that MPesa and credit/debit cards suffer an integrity deficit and that is why 9 out of 10 transactions are still in cash. In my estimation, PR is putting lipstick on the pig that is Kenya's corporate scene. What PR forgets is that no matter how much paint you slather on a pig's chaps, it remains a pig with all its porcine qualities undiminished. The day my level of trust in my telco and my bank goes up a notch, I'll reconsider my animus against them.