{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Some simple ways to ensure that the thieves don’t eat everything - Opinion/Editorial | The Citizen

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Some simple ways to ensure that the thieves don't eat everything - Opinion/Editorial

 Anger continues to grow in Kenya against official waste and corruption.

The outpouring against corruption in Kenya has reached a level that some are saying is beginning to damage brand Kenya globally.

The private sector has got into the mix, rallying for honesty, and now leading corporate figures, like Safaricom chief Bob Collymore, declaring their wealth.

With active citizens, these kinds of things make some difference. Some years back I visited a small city government outside Norway's capital Oslo.

In its 2015 index, Transparency International listed Norway's as the world's fifth least corrupt country. Norway's laws are so robust, its business people can be tried for corrupt and actions and other transgressions their companies commit abroad. It proves the point that actions of Kenya's private sector leaders can actually make a difference, but more muscular efforts are needed.

T-shirt-wearing long-bearded leftists controlled the city government I visited. It had a great reputation for efficiency, honesty, and delivery of services.

One thing it did to bring transparency to city government was publishing everything. Every expenditure of public money was available online and even posted on notice boards, as were the salaries, allowances, reimbursements of everyone paid from its budget!

It is not easy work getting to the top of the honesty rankings in Africa.

Rwanda, which probably sends the most students abroad on state scholarship in East Africa, does it with an eye to history. With its enemies accusing the government of favouring the minority Tutsi against the Hutu, it has called in transparency to help its cause.

Names of students shortlisted, and then those picked, for scholarships outside the country are published. Folks can read for themselves and figure out who is getting what. It helped shift the conversation on the issue.

So why is it that countries need more than these types of transparency to beat back corruption definitively? Because people beat the system.

Corruption is rife in Uganda too, but once in a blue moon the people at the top wake up and swing the axe. Some years ago some chaps who were stealing billions of shillings of pension money were rounded up. This time they didn't buy their way out. They were kept in prison, and tried.

One of them recently negotiated a lenient sentence in exchange for returning some of the loot.

However, that crackdown happened when banking rules were being also tightened to crack down on money laundering.

The result, economists say, is that big money in the country is outside the banking system. Kampala is full stories of barricaded houses stacked with money.

It's probably true, because the one business that is thriving in the city is fumigation. It's alleged that a few jobs fumigating Kampala's money stashes, because you are also paid to buy your silence, can set up a man or woman with modest tastes and ambitions for life.

Some crooks, though, still do things the old fashioned way – keeping it under the mattress. A while ago a government official kept stolen millions in bags under the marital bed.

Then he quarrelled with his wife, and the next time he looked under the bed, the bags were half-empty. She had chopped off her bit and kept it away. If he were a wise man, the country would never have known about it. But he was a fool. He reported her to the police for theft.

The media had a party with the story.

So what is needed not just drastic action that also closes those kinds of loopholes, yes, but also what we might call "demonstrative" action. Transparency is good because it helps mobilise an anti-corruption constituency that leaders can use as a base to fight graft.

But, as Tanzania's new president John Magufuli is proving to an Africa which is watching his every action with amazement, the one thing the continent's corrupt brigade fear the most is not the law or the media. It's the president.

If President Kenyatta one morning went to Pumwani Maternity Hospital, sat down in a ward, sacked incompetent and corruption, and said he wasn't leaving until the place was crisped up he would set off a revolution.

It seems the more Africa changes the more it stays the same. If there is one thing we understand the way our grandparents did, it's the power of the chief.

-The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3     

Some simple ways to ensure that the thieves don't eat everything - Opinion/Editorial | The Citizen

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