Kenya: State of the nation address!

In a few days time, President Uhuru Kenyatta will make his third State of the Nation address. The Head of State will speak to the joint houses of Parliament and to the country on Kenya’s social, political and economic health. In line with the Constitution, he is expected to show how his government is adhering to national values and promoting good governance and national unity.

On the economy and governance, we are likely to hear statistics of growth and of new targets. We are likely to hear about reduced oil prices and of the visits by President Obama, the Pope and of the UNCTD meeting in Nairobi as indices of good performance. 

Kenya’s role in regional matters might also come up and maybe a word on devolution, too. This is good. However, sustainable youth agenda remains a challenge. Uwezo Fund seems to be a conduit for corruption, as we have seen what is happening in the Youth Fund. There is no tangible engagement with unemployment among the youth. This is a time bomb. The government must stop paying lip service to the youth.

Equally important is deliberate and sustained exclusion of women. Today President Kenyatta presides over an unconstitutional Cabinet. This should not even be a matter for discussion and argument. The gender equation in the Cabinet is illegal. Without first correcting this imbalance, the President should avoid talking about the Constitution altogether. Indeed, the Constitution has been failed in several other areas. The National Government continues to cling on to devolved functions because of wanting to control the money that should follow those functions to counties. The catalogue of corruption in National Government is a clear indication of why those functions have not been allowed to go. President Kenyatta should address this or refrain from talking about the equality, the Constitution and devolution.

A related anomaly is that the structure of the Public Service remains unclear. Having created ministries and appointed office holders, the President has failed to show which government departments and parastatals fall under which ministry. Some departments that belonged to defunct ministries do not know where they fall. Now one minister will attempt to lay claim on a certain function, only for another one to say it is his. President Kenyatta should streamline this ahead of the State of the Nation address. Once again, corruption and theft thrives under this ambiguity. I would want to believe that this is not deliberate and sinister organised disorganisation of government.

Predictably, the President will say many good things about his government, while also finding scapegoats and excuses for the things that have not worked. The President will be mindful that next year is an election year. He is likely therefore to paint a rosy picture and to stretch the reality, both when giving a catalogue of his government’s achievements and explaining away what has not been achieved.

 In all this, however, the President will do well to remember that he is the person with the instruments of government. He must refrain from scapegoating. In particular, he must allow the Opposition to continue faulting his government while the media faults both. The Opposition, especially, does not exist to praise his government.

Kenyans will expect reliable updates on the Standard Gauge Railway, on the Lapsset project and on the school laptops project. These should not be window dressed to mask corruption that has been alleged in these areas. The latest spin in government is that civil freedoms and liberties are making it impossible for the government to fight corruption. This is bullshit. The President should steer clear of this cheap propaganda. Indeed, if he believes that he cannot fight corruption, he must tell the nation why he remains in power and why he needs a second term.

Nonetheless, I expect to hear hard-to-believe garbage about the war on corruption. This has been the zone of spectacular failure. Indeed, it is no longer in doubt that one of the businesses and rewards of government in Kenya is corruption. In this regard, both the President and his deputy are most eloquent and angry when addressing those who speak against corruption than they are when speaking about those who loot national coffers.

This government arrived to power talking about national unity, the economy and open governance. Naturally the three areas form a basis for assessment of government’s performance. To address national unity, the President and his deputy want to dissolve the constituent parties in the ruling Jubilee Alliance and replace the alliance with one party. Rather than be the harbinger to the much-touted unity, this idea is causing divisions in Jubilee, even before they can hope to rope in others. 

Political parties in Kenya are tribal outfits; each led by a tribal leader. The thinking is that if you replace them with one party, you will achieve national unity.

This is a curious and retrogressive way of looking at things. It is a rollback to the 1960s when Kenya became a de facto one party state. The argument was exactly the same. Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta argued that political pluralism was hurting national unity. That was how competition of ideas was killed and one-party dictatorship established. 

National unity in a multi-tribal society is best nurtured through giving all citizens equal opportunities. In this the Jubilee government has failed grossly. President Kenyatta presides over an ethnic duopoly. Even if all the political parties in Kenya were to be dissolved and replaced with only one party, this alone would not create national unity. The face of the Public Service is disturbingly duopolistic. If the President does not dismantle this duopoly and replace it with the face of Kenya, his national unity proclamations remain a pipe dream and a formation of empty words.

The president is limited too on the fight against corruption!

In the war against corruption, the president's hands are tied!

Kenya is in the grip of a vicious war on graft.

The tentacles of vastly networked cartels that collectively siphon millions each year from public institutions are so far-reaching that it will take more than the resignation or firing of individuals holding offices to root out corruption.

It’s a war, one with far more players and strategies than some actors in the civil society would care to admit.

Just like in the theatre of war, there are many battles to be fought, many targets to set and attain and most certainly, many combatants to face; all of whom are determined to retain their vested interests.

Endemic and systematised corruption as Kenya’s case illustrates, must be due to our economic culture and the way business is conducted.

Corruption in Government is not isolated nor does it occur in a vacuum where only Government is susceptible to graft.

Indeed, as Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore noted in January 2016, the private sector needs to honour their pledges made in November 2015 to help the Government to fight corruption as well; because usually they are the ones on the other side.

This is because 70 per cent of all perceived corruption has to do with public procurement, in which the private sector is heavily involved.

If 70 per cent of corrupt deals occur through the participation of the private sector, then we really must share the blame equally between both sectors.

This is a point that seems to have been completely overlooked by the civil society sector, which has been quite liberal with ultimatums to Government on the need to deal with corruption.

What I wish the civil society would do is agitate for changes within the law, as regards the President’s mandate to fight corruption.

The irony seems to be lost on them when they conveniently forget that they are demanding that the Government must follow the constitution without understanding that the constitution as currently structured, demands that the President do nothing directly as regards fighting corruption

We cannot therefore threaten mass action against the President for not doing anything to fight corruption, when he actually cannot do anything to fight corruption directly without breaking the constitution.

Anyone paying keen attention to the fight against graft will note that exposing, investigating and prosecuting corruption involves several agencies, including the Ethics and Anti Corruption Commission, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

The police, anti-fraud units, whistle-blowers and the Judiciary. It beggars belief that anyone would expect the President, who is constitutionally mandated to deal with corruption only through these institutions, to be able to turn-around corruption cases overnight.

In a country where someone is deemed innocent until proven otherwise, the President should not even fire someone just because they are alleged to be corrupt!

Today we have set up independent institutions that check each other’s powers, especially as regards who to charge on claims that they are corrupt. It is a tedious process that takes forever.

It also gives the guilty a chance to play around with the law and manipulate events as they defend themselves.

This means that the process of fighting corruption cannot just occur in a flash, just like the process of creating the cartels and strategies to embezzle doesn’t happen spontaneously.

It is very frustrating to genuine believers in the need to eradicate corruption.

It makes one want to ask for the China option; death by firing squad, for corruption offenders. The psychological expectations of some of us are also set by the sensational media headlines we encounter every day.

We are being primed to expect something sudden and dramatic to occur in this war.

But we must remember what the 2010 constitution was trying to cure. We come from a history where political differences could put you in jail after ensuring you lost all your property.

If we give the power to determine who should be prosecuted on charges of corruption to a political figure, then we must accept that this power will sometimes be used to settle political scores. It has been done in our past.

We therefore need some sobriety as we conduct an honest scrutiny of the demands made upon the president in the war against corruption.

The reality of fighting the war on graft is that it is a process, a building up of several incidences and actions taken, and never one singular event that signal the end of war.

However, some of us clearly think that the president should be judge, jury and executioner of suspects of corruption, as well as being the one who repossess assets suspected to be illegally acquired.

If this is what we want, then we need to re look at our laws and agitate for the changes that will give the President requisite powers to do this.

Kenya headed to the dawgz!

State capture indeed!

According to Wikipedia, state capture refers to a situation where powerful institutions, companies or oligarchs within or outside a country use corruption to shape a nation’s legal environment, policies and economy to benefit their own private interests.

This makes it one of the most ubiquitous forms of corruption. From where I sit, Kenya is in the throes of state capture, with all arms – judiciary, legislature, executive and regulatory institutions – aiding and abetting the act.

There are certain characteristics representative of countries that can be categorised as captured states. In the conventional forms of corruption, entities and individuals exploit loopholes in the way that prevailing laws and regulations are applied.

In state capture (also described as a form of grand corruption), parliamentarians’ votes on important pieces of legislation are bought through various means including outright monetary compensation, the promise of future favours or leniency against future crimes and coveted positions in decision-making roles.

Outside of legislation, bribes are made to the judiciary to enact favourable rulings and influence court decisions. The result is blatant latitude by the perpetrators that communicates ‘we will do whatever needs to be done to commit graft, including changing the existing laws’. Do the above scenarios sound familiar?

For all the noise we have been making regarding fighting graft, the reality on the ground begs to strongly differ. Territories which succeed in stemming endemic corruption apply a powerful trifecta - principal buy in, mechanisms to stop graft incidents before they transpire and non-discriminatory application of proportional justice.

On the converse, what we have succeeded in is the art of show and tell – a facetious mockery of speaking out against corruption while endorsing it behind the scenes.

Our principals make speeches, from which one out of every four is hard-hitting and rife with possibility.

And every time, we feel a sense of hope; thinking that we may be finally poised to see some real change in the political scandal trajectory.

And every time, we discover it was just wishful reform agenda.

How else would you describe the scenario we find ourselves in where every week there are new cases of foul play being unearthed, each conducted with more impunity than the last, and each trying to outdo the other? Or the fact that the perpetrators are in their (the principals’) immediate backyard? If this is not endorsing the very crimes being decried, then what is?

For the record, the mere condemnation of sleaze, without applying the ‘stick’ is not fighting corruption. It is simply noise, and does not amount to principal buy in.

The second part of the trifecta is sorely lacking too. Implementing systems in the form of mechanisms can only work if they carry out the task they were intended for

I heard a supporter of IFMIS speaking on a public platform about the fact that if it weren’t for the system, we would not know that there were funds that had been misappropriated.

The effectiveness of a system is not in its ability to alert on a fraud after the fact, rather to appropriately flag and prevent it, as far as is possible before human intervention intercedes. To praise the implementation of a multi-million-dollar system whereby zeroes can be added without the back-end triggering an alarm is making a mockery of our intelligence.

Lastly, we have perfected the art of applying such discriminatory justice that it would be hilarious if it were not so sad. Did you hear of the lotion (priced Sh780) thief who was sentenced to two years in jail? Or the granny who languished in prison for months over stealing two plastic chairs?

Yet the perpetrators of billions in the Eurobond scandal, the NYS Sh791million, Youth Fund’s Sh115 million, billions from State-owned Kenya Power, returnees of Goldenberg with more procurement scandals all walk free while the public is hoodwinked into claims of ‘investigations’ and ‘gathering of evidence’.

The sentiment is that justice is for the rest of us. It is not for those who are milking this country dry and stashing away funds for the next elections.

One of the recommended ways for tackling the slide of a country into a captured state touches on prioritisation of the reforms agenda. However, because it is in the interest of the legislators, justice system and the political elite to maintain the status quo, this path is fraught with difficulty and frustration.

However, the grand total of those who are in a position to fight for the status quo amounts to less than 10 per cent of the voting population. As I keep saying, we have more power than we think and we need to start exercising that power.

As we prepare to go into elections, it is about time we started to pay more attention to those we are entrusting with our interests.

Dear Kenya: Why am not coming home any soon!

Failed trust. Not sure you can hold my weight!!

“So what keeps you here?” I once was asked by a Kenyan journalist I met in Kampala.

“So many things,” I said. Amid contagious nostalgia, I couldn’t hide what I considered barriers against my return to my mother country!

“I don’t feel appreciated, welcomed, liked... simply put it this way, there is no space for me at home.” 
This sentiment represents the many Kenyans whose combined remittance to the country stood at Sh130 billion in 2014 making them a key Forex earner for the country.

But even then, Kenyans criticize diaspora professionals for what they see as their unwillingness to make the sacrifice to foster and advance development causes at home.

In fact, most feel lampooned, ridiculed because of the jobs they engage in; from working in nursing homes, to restaurants to cleaning toilets in the UK and maids in the Middle East!

There are also Kenyans doing very well in career jobs abroad. They have made it into the big leagues.

But then those criticizing them fail to understand the underlying reasons fueling their reluctance to contribute meaningfully to the leadership and development of Kenya.

This realization points out the most common barriers and presents a conceptual framework for cultivating and unleashing the expertise of these highly effective Kenyan professionals for the betterment of Kenya.

In Africa and Europe,there are many highly skilled and experienced Kenyan professionals that have dedicated their lives to the public service and industries of their host countries.

They’ve honed their skills and have perfected the art of working smart, getting more done in less time and working cost effectively. In this new era of mean and lean work schematics, the Kenyan diaspora professionals are on the cutting edge. Their day-to-day work is in fast-paced environments awash with managerial strategies directed at accomplishing goals and objectives. They’ve learnt the merits of working strategically and building partnership and have experienced fruits of such initiatives.

They’ve learned work etiquette and have developed a deep understanding of working smart and for results. Most importantly, they’ve worked long enough to witness how concepts are converted to realities.

Then why are such individuals dis-engaged from contributing to the re-building of Kenya? A country that is in dire need of such talented individuals?

I know with certainty it is not due to lack of patriotism.

 In my opinion, meaningful contributions are short-lived because we haven’t engaged the diaspora well.

In creating successful platforms aimed at attracting diaspora talent, we must remember that these established professionals already earn good incomes, live modestly if not lavishly, and have invested in their careers.

Needless to say, these professionals have beaten the odds, as they are self-made success stories and have overcome many challenges. More significantly, the values of equal opportunities, inclusivity and fairness have propelled them to very high professional positions.

However, in this new era of the Internet and high-speed face-to-face technology, opportunities exist to plug these proven experts into the development agenda of our country.

To engage these diaspora professionals in a meaningful win-win format, I propose the creation of ‘distance working’ to attract interested diaspora professionals in contributing their talent to various government entities.

This can be done through the creation of senior fellowship positions. There was once a Diasporas' department in the then office of the prime minister! Whatever happened!

 I envision the creation of a unified, process owned and created by one of the ministries designed to attract the most experienced, competent diaspora professionals using a specified website designed for this purpose.

Perhaps this will expand to counties from where interested diaspora professionals would compete for these opportunities. Interested diaspora professionals may be called upon to help create such a system.

In my opinion, the biggest gain from these workers is not necessarily their monetary remittances and technical skills, but opportunities to mentor young rising stars holding leadership positions in counties. Call it capacity building in all areas of development!

These senior fellows could play a great role in training the next leadership generation, helping them learn strategies that would increase their productivity; build their leadership competency skills; and help them learn how to work smart and for results. These would in turn help them accelerate the promise of a devolved government.

These senior fellows could be a sounding board for their mentees to bounce off ideas and plan their implementation.

Considering the many obligations these professionals have, this effort would be worthwhile. Senior fellows could be paid a stipend to allow them to suspend some of their existing responsibilities, allowing them to commit 10-40 hours of mentorship per month.

The Kenyan diaspora professionals from all over the world would certainly welcome this or other ideas.