Sweet hypocrisy.

You can tell that many Kenyans don't really give two shits about what the constitution says about leadership an integrity. No doubt they follow keenly allegations of graft that are broadcast in the media, but they don't think it has anything to do with the price of tea in China. In recent weeks, political and administrative leaders have been in the news regarding goings on at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Uasin Gishu County.

There is a plan to expand the capacity of the hospital, and this may require either expanding the current facilities or moving the entire establishment to a greenfield site. The contractors, the hospital's director and the Deputy President have been mentioned in connection with this programme. Allegations of bribery and tender-inflating have been made with the director of the hospital being implicated in the allegations. Then the Cabinet Secretary for Health decided to "redeploy" the director to Afya House. That redeployment set the cat among the pigeons.

His replacement, letter of appointment in hand, received a hostile reception from Uasin Gishu MPs and residents alike and not more than twenty-four hours after making his initial tour of the facility, he was headed back to Nairobi and the now-no-longer-former director's redeployment had been rescinded. One of the residents interviewed by Kenya's leading tabloid claimed that had the director been redeployed as had been intended, another member of the Elgeyo-Marakwet would have lost his job, never mind that his redeployment was not a dismissal. (The other Elgeyo-Marakwet civil servant she was referring to was the spectacularly gaffe-prone former Inspector-General to Police, David Kimaiyo, who has since been appointed as the chairperson of the Kenya Airports Authority.)

What is interesting is that these people who intervened in force on behalf of the director did not care whether the allegations made against him were true or not; they were only concerned with the appearance that Elgeyo-Marakwet would not have senior officers in the government. I am not alleging that it was a this-is-our-time-to-eat reasoning; but it is instructive that they did not want the director to be redeployed to some other position in the government regardless of the accusations made against him in relation to his current bailiwick.

We are a bit schizophrenic when it comes to graft. We hate to part with bribes but we will bridle with rage when "our man" - strange how it is always men - is hounded by the sleuths of the anticorruption commission or uppity Cabinet Secretaries. In the name of measuring up in the big boss stakes, "we" do not want one of our own to be redeployed to some inferior invisible government post because it is seen as a slap in our collective face. We should stop the hypocrisy; and that includes pretending to be outraged with the fantasy being concocted in the NYS that between November 2014 and June 2015, it was entirely reasonable to spend thirteen million shillings on sugar.