Propriety, Posterity, Prudence, Prurience, the President and the Pope

You may have thought that the events from a very busy five days last week were unrelated, but that’s only if you looked at these on the surface. The week was a nightmare one for media editors. It was such a ‘heavy’ period that bulletins and front-pages kept having to be re-thought and re-designed, as events chopped and changed with such rapidity that we almost could not keep up. If you think about it, though, the corruption announcements on Monday, the cabinet re-shuffle on Tuesday, the Pope’s arrival on Wednesday, and his hard-hitting messages on Friday were all of a piece. There was a theme running through them – not an obvious one, but a very powerful one all the same.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, on Monday and Tuesday evenings, made what look, to the surface, like far-reaching proclamations on the fight against corruption and the re-organisation of government. He appealed not just to the legal elements of the anti-graft fight, but also made a moral appeal to those in government and to young people. The long-awaited reshuffle was the next big announcement, with the suspended Cabinet Secretaries finally losing their jobs, and new, fresh faces appointed (with a few old politicians thrown in).

Wednesday was all about the Pope. When he landed in Nairobi, speculation was on his choice of transportation. Wags had postulated that he would be chauffeured in that old workhorse, a Toyota Probox. His choice of vehicle was no less surprising, it being a humble, tiny Honda Ballade. He kept his windows open as he slowly made his way from the airport to State House, and used it as his preferred means of travel for the three days he was here. Much was obviously made of the difference between the humility of the Pope and the arrogance of Kenya’s 'prophets', 'bishops' and 'apostles’, in their massive sport utility vehicles and their habit of behaving like ill-mannered politicians in their lifestyle choices.

The uniting theme in all this is the issue of incentives. What makes a certain group of people behave in one way and not another? Why do appeals to propriety, posterity and prudence not work when the animating instinct is prurience? What makes Pope Francis, a man of unmatched religious power and influence, comfortable in a small car; and a self-declared religious leader eager to flaunt ill-gotten wealth despite all of the Bible’s admonitions?

President Kenyatta’s corruption announcements are well-meaning, but only a few, in my estimation, will change the dynamics that drive corruption and make it such a menace to society. Greed is a significant factor in the affairs of the corrupt, but so, significantly, is fear. Many public officers are avaricious because they’re afraid of the poverty and shame when they leave public office without a nest egg. They have seen far too many examples of pauperised former officials, whose only material possessions are yellowing newspaper cuttings of them in their heyday, and a bitter nostalgia of a time when they called the shots.

In contrast, they see thieves not only living ostensibly comfortable lives, but also setting up their children to perpetuate an oligarchy because they can afford the expensive education needed for these offspring. This driving fear also leads them to seek political office, so that proximity to, or actual wielding of, power can help them protect these ill-gotten gains.

President Kenyatta’s corruption crusade does little to address these. If you layer onto this the fact that Kenyans deify wealth with little question of its provenance, then the efforts will find little success. There are far too many dynasties that have been built on the proceeds of theft for us to excise them easily, even with the best of intentions.

The one incentive that will work is ensnaring bankers in the anti-corruption fight. All thieves need to launder their money through the banking system, and when this is removed from the equation, we will start seeing significant change.

On to the Pope. Again, the respect, warmth and affection accorded to Pope Francis are automatic. The weight of his office, developed and refined through millennia of acquisition of political and moral power, mean that he has nothing to prove, and he can then simply be himself, as humble as that persona is. Kenyan religious overlords, whose ‘ministries’ were founded in dusty streets and tiny hovels just a few years ago, need to prove to their flock that they have made it. They depend on charisma to attract these faithful and to get them to dig into their pockets, and nothing screams charisma as a flock that goes googly-eyed at the sight of their pastor driving in a Range Rover. These ‘churches’ will likely not outlast their founders, so the pastors need to make as much as they can while the going is good. Pope Francis doesn’t need an ostentatious display of wealth and power to get a nation to stop for him – ‘prophets’ and ‘apostles’ need to constantly shout at the tops of their voices to make sure that they don’t lose their place in this temporal firmament.

So the Pope and the President may have taught us lessons in that very busy week, but these will only sink in when the incentives to learn them are right.

Also published in the Daily Nation on 1 December 2015