Kenya will prevail.

This is how I understand it: corruptly acquire a very fat stack. Admit the acquisition. Pay a fine. Or pay back the fat stack. Get amnesty. Proceed on you merry way. This is how you know that lip service is the only service you will receive in the officially hallowed halls of the public service especially when it comes to the knotty problem of graft in high places - and low.

There is a canard abroad in the land that in order to win the war on graft, if indeed it is a war, we must find committed men and women to head the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission. Those at the forefront of peddling this heretical idea happen to have a deeply vested interest in the continued existence of the commission. Its existence is a sign that we are truly uninterested in turning things around. In fact, its existence is a reason why every now and then, when the scale of the anti-corruption challenge threatens to overwhelm us, we are bombarded with pleas for amnesty for those caught with their hands in the public cookie jars.

In two decades of anti-corruption posturing, not one ex-Cabinet member has been convicted. There is the former securocrat who was almost bankrupt when he was appointed to the Cabinet but is now coining it as if he was Croesus. There is the former parastatal boss who oversaw hundreds of millions of donor funds who seems to live the life of European royalty. We like to pretend that former presidents sweated when they were in the saddle and that the billions they owned or own were amassed by dint of hard work. In all this, the anti-corruption watchdog has gone from strength to strength, loosing friends, alienating Kenyans and making a pest of itself among the low-hanging fruit  of the rank-and-file of the public service.

The drama surrounding the latest crop of anti-corruption commissioners is not that surprising. We have had an ex-policeman billionaire, an ex-judge and a constitutional lawyer at the top. They were all a disaster. The new boys and girls were appointed despite serious doubts of their capacity or even probity. One resigned after being bullied. One resigned after being indicted. One remains and she seems determined to push the envelope forgetting that no one wants her there, no one supports her determined grip on the office and no ne will notice when she eventually slinks away in humiliation.

What should concern the ones supporting the ludicrous demands for amnesty for thuggish types is the fact that when "corruption fights back", it does so nowadays with a mix of finesse and thuggishness. Apparently one commissioner was offered a diplomatic spot in Brazil while another had firearms brandished in her face. Don't you want to know who was both offering the sops and intimidating the commissioners?

Perhaps it is time to admit that graft is here to stay. Whether it is of the petty kind or the grand one that affects the national economy in insidious ways, we are prepared to live with it. We offer and solicit petty amounts for "small" things. We assassinate one another over billions in public tenders. Even the men, and women, of the cloth have taken to robbing their congregations blind while simultaneously screaming that they are being persecuted when the lawmen come after them. The Roman Empire collapsed because it did not share the spoils of its graft fairly or evenly. Kenya will prevail because everyone is on the take.