Kenyan politics as a process of laundering thieves and murderers

By: Mutuma Mathiu
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[ Posted On: 2007-12-09 ]

Imagine for a moment that you are, heaven forbid, Al Capone, Meyer Lanskey or their local Mungiki mafia equivalent. You are making money lots of money, all of it in cash and in small bills from rackets such as enslaving women and renting them out to perverts or using children in sweat shops, or extorting money from shopkeepers by breaking their knees or matatu owners by chopping off the heads of their drivers.

Or probably you are a bank robber and have just pulled off a "job," killing a few innocent Kenyans and scaring others half to death while doing it.

Now you will have this pile of dirty cash. It is still money, but it is dangerous, probably marked money which is of limited use to you. You can keep it under the mattress and make yourself a target for a more desperate gangster. Most certainly you can use it to take care of your costs, such as paying sub-thugs and corrupt police officers, but you need to "launder" your dirty profits.

So you open all these dummy, shell companies whose proceeds from operations you inflate and bank your dirty as if it is earnings from the joker enterprises. Once the money is accepted in the bank, then you can move it around, invest it, hide it and do many other things which criminals do with their money. In other words, it becomes clean money.

Now, imagine that you are a corruption baron who has stolen billions of shillings from the taxpayer — and killed thousands of Kenyans who couldn't find medicine in hospitals. Everybody knows you are a thief. The people are angry with you, given half a chance they would tear you to small pieces and feed them to the marabou storks on Uhuru Highway. You were taken to court but because you are rich you could afford the best and most corrupt lawyers. They ensured that probably you appeared before the right judge and tied up your whole case in the legal system so completely that no one has a chance in hell of disentangling it in the next 50 years.

Secondly, because people in law enforcement are corrupt and you are swimming in money, you have bribed them to help you defeat the process. With their agreement and tacit help, you are always one step ahead in the game. They stage arrests, for example, then quietly free you to lead a good life away from the public eye in your own house with your own lovely wife.

Again because you have lots of money, you have bought big politicians. They fly cover for you, take care of Parliament and its committees, they also scare off junior bureaucrats in law enforcement and so on.

You have bought your freedom. But it is like the direct proceeds of prostitution. It is dirty freedom. So, what do you do?

In your little cunning brain, you know that you are not safe. You are thief, albeit a free one. You live in fear that an honest man will come by one day and justice shall be done unto you.

You know you can not trust your protectors. You fear that these avaricious partners who stand watch over you will one day get sloppy, or will get even greedier, and throw you to the storks. You live in freedom but in mortal fear of justice. So, for lasting protection, you join a community of those like you and take safety in numbers. You become part of the process that makes laws and (mis)rules society.

By acquiring power, you launder yourself so that you become untouchable and unreachable.

Corruption in Africa: The Kenyan Experience

You join politics.

In writing this column, I have not bothered to read the election law or the law governing the joining, forming and buying of political parties.

There is no point, those laws do not have the effect of keeping thieves, murderers, adulterers and other evil-doers as far away from power as legally possible.

The people who govern, one would expect, are those who, by their example represent the best among us. They work hard, they take good care of their families, they are not greedy, they are dedicated and they are not tribalists.

One would expect that a system would be in place to ensure that those who are clearly corrupt, even though they have not been sent to jail, are not allowed into the National Assembly.

But no, that is not so. Kenyan politics has become the safest (though not cheapest) means of laundering thieves and other enemies of society. And as a community of thieves and evil, they endeavour to hold us hostage.

I fully expect the coming Parliament, unless Kenyans exercise unusual sagacity, to surpass the greedy and corrupt one that it shall be replacing.

I have been reading/watching various doomsday theories about the possible extinction of the human race by various natural — and possibly man-made methods. Example, an asteroid, either by the machinations of karma, the mysteries of celestial physics, or just the force — arranges to be on a collision course with Earth. It smashes into our atmosphere and sheers it off into space. Result? Earth (and man) is toast.

The so-called Tunguska Event early in the last century has been quoted as a piece of our likely future. An object, probably as big as a kilometre wide, possibly the fragment of a comet or meteor, explodes 5-10km above ground. The explosion is 1,000 times as powerful as that of the Hiroshima bomb and destroys 80 million trees in a 2,000 square kilometre area.

Now, if you increase the size of the alien body to 10km wide and karma or the force organises the orbit to bring the point of collision/explosion as somewhere more habited than Tunguska in Siberia, you begin to understand the extinction picture.

I have a scientific explanation for the goat in Kianjai market, Meru North, which is keeping the company of dogs. It has nothing to do with the lioness-oryx phenomenon. The young goat eats so many miraa leaves and gets such a high that it can't tell a dog from a goat. If you chewed as much miraa as this goat does, neither would you.

REFERENCES:

1. Initiatives against corruption in Kenya: Legal and policy interventions, 1995-2001

2. The state and land: Case studies in corruption and mismanagement

3. Anatomy of a scam: John Githongo, Kenya's exiled anti-corruption chief, speaks to Vanessa Baird.(WHISTLE BLOWER)(Interview): An article from: New Internationalist

4. Clean Election Campaign diary: Wanjiru Mungai writes about her experience of working with a campaign to end corruption in Kenyan politics. (Kenya Elections).: An article from: For A Change

5. The black bar: Corruption and political intrigue within Kenya's legal fraternity

6. The anatomy of corruption in Kenya: Legal, political, and socio-economic perspectives

7. Kenya Emerges From The Shadows (anti-corruption reforms ): An article from: Market Africa Mid-East

8. 'I knew too much'.(WHISTLE BLOWER)(Kenya)(Chronology): An article from: New Internationalist

9. Risks Of Knowledge: Investigations Into Death Of Hon. Minister (New African Histories)

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Mutuma Mathiu is the managing editor, Sunday Nation.

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