Even with my lackadaisical approach to the small issue of the safety of my immortal soul, I pray to Almighty God that He should never, ever hand me the poisoned chalice that is a Cabinet position—or a "senior" position in the Government. These are offices that seem to attract sharks of unremitting savagery, where one false move could mean the end of a career or a decade playing hide-and-seek with the forces of law and order in and out of court. David Mwiraria certainly did not come to a good end after his stint as Mwai Kibaki's Finance Minister ended in ignominy.
President Uhuru Kenyatta's Cabinet has haemorrhaged Cabinet Secretaries in the last eighteen months. This is unprecedented. His government has haemorrhaged Principal Secretaries and senior civil servants at an even faster clip. And all because no one really believe him when he reiterates his commitment to the war on corruption.
In China, those accused of corruption rarely ever get away with it. Now theirs is a tightly controlled political environment, in which everything appears to be scripted, but when you have millions rising through the ranks of the Communist Party, a few truly rotten apples are bound to rise to the top. When the party finally says "Enough is enough" the accused frequently faces a firing squad, his family is disgraced and his ill-gotten wealth is confiscated. Sometimes they confiscate everything, ill-gotten and legitimate, as a lesson to all.
In Kenya, as Mr Mwiraria demonstrates every single day, we will not go to any length to nail an accused persons hide to the wall, not if they they are the favoured pets of the President and his "people." Look at the saga of James Gichuru and Chris Okemo, whose half-a-billion shillings has just been confiscated by a royal court on the island of Jersey. Since unsavoury revelations were made of their "business" dealings were made in 2011, they have successfully forestalled any attempt to hold them to account. They remain free. They continue to enjoy the benefit of their wealth, ill-gotten and legitimate.
More often than not, unlike in China where senior party leaders get a bullet to the head for corruption, in Kenya the corrupt high and mighty swan around like princes of the city, unafraid of the President, the prosecutors or the courts, giving us The Finger for being so gullible and docile. If you know of any ex-waziri in Kenya who has ever lost his wealth or liberty because of his corrupt acts, you might just be living in a parallel universe.
Kenyans want the corrupt to be punished. Some have suggested that the appropriate punishment should be the Kenyan equivalent of what Jerry Rawlings second military junta did in 1981: line the former ministers up in the national stadium, read out their crimes in front of a crowd of thousands, and execute them by firing squad as enemies of the people. We need not go that far but we must punish the waziris. Not slaps on the wrists, no. Proper punishment. The only thing they love is their ill-gotten wealth. Seize it all! Deprive them of everything except their pensions. Take away their cars, houses, planes, yachts, commercial buildings, expensive watches, paintings, flat-screen TVs, surround sound home theatre systems...everything. Leave them with the cloths on their backs and their pensions and watch every other thief adjust his behaviour—swiftly.
Let them hire all the lawyers in the world if they want, but do not give back a cent other than their pension. Why am I going on about the pension? Because we want them to live long, so that the people can see them broken and poverty-stricken. The people must see them broken and poor. The people must laugh at them. The people must pity them. The people must be fully aware of the cost of corruption. We must be pitiless. It is the only way that we can move forward as a nation. It is the only way the President can redeem himself in our eyes.
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