How the cookie crumbles

On 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heidrich held a conference at a villa in Wansee at which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was discussed. The horror unleashed on European Jews by the Nazi High Command has come to be known as the Holocaust. What is striking is that the Germans, methodical and detail-oriented as always, wrote down everything they ever did, ever evil they ever committed. It is their attention to detail that guaranteed that when the remain Nazi leaders were put on trial in Nuremberg, they would all be convicted.

This is the Information Age, where the digital tools at our disposal guarantee that no information is ever far from the public domain. The National Youth Service has lost close to eight hundred million shillings. That is the amount that is known to have been lost. This is not the sophisticated crime its authors intended. It is the IFMIS' (Integrated Financial Management Information System) equivalent of the classic smash-and-grab. It is emblematic of the problems that the public procurement environment in Kenya suffers from.

In Kenya, our desire to save face is the guiding principle of the public service. There is no one in the entire public service willing to admit that they might be wrong, that the Government might be wrong. It is this obsessive desire to save face that opens so many doors to the digital smash-and-grab crowd. In our zeal to keep the egg off the faces of the moving and shaking personages of the upper echelons of the public service, the nefarious-minded take advantage of every loophole in the books, no matter how small or obscure, to conduct swindles of such simplicity it must drive the Head of Government apoplectic with rage - except that he seems to be a member of this do-not-embarass-me brigade too.

One of the particularly insidious features of our system is that things are not written down unless they absolutely must and even the, the number of civil servants willing to put their signature ion those documents is frighteningly small and grows smaller the high up the hierarchy you go. For sure Cabinet Secretaries and Principle Secretaries avoid as much as possible signing anything that pays out money to anyone; it is how everyone and his cat who was not the CS or the PS in the NYS saga got the short end of the CID stick recently. No matter how much Alfred Keter screams, the Devolution and Planning bigwigs will not be facing the ruinous attentions of the National Assembly or the EACC - their fingerprints, quite literally, are nowhere to be found in the saga. If it really gets out of hand, all bets are off that it is the D-G who gets it in the neck.

However, just because there are no fingerprints doesn't mean there are no records. Even with our notorious secrecy, John Githongo pioneered the collection of proof by unconventional means. The truth may not come out today, but it is almost certain that it will come out and all the secrecy and obfuscation in the world won't be able to disguise the true authors of the scam. To be honest, I don't think the CS or the PS had anything to do with it, though the PS should have known better. The NYS is one of the darlings of the perfidious KANU Era and anyone who though new uniforms and five-point strategies were all that were needed to sweep out its Augean stables has simply not been paying attention. The CS s capable enough, but the NYS is even older than her and she will need much more than her strength and determination to get it on an even footing. That's just how the cookie crumbles.