By TEE NGUGI

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In last week’s column, I decried the scale, blatancy and callousness of corruption in the first five years of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration that will leave a blemish on his legacy. No sooner had the ink on that piece dried up, than Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission CEO Twalib Mbarak revealed that not a single county was free of serious graft. The EACC chief said that county procurement procedures would be flouted so as to award tenders to cronies or family members. Kickbacks were also a regular feature in the award of tenders. Some cases involved governors doing business with the county through proxies land grabbing, abuse of allowance and per diem procedures, and other malfeasance also feature.

Listening to the EACC chief, one wonders what percentage of the money given to counties since the bold devolution experiment in 2013 was stolen. Since devolution is judged a great transformative experiment, the next question becomes: What if every coin given to the counties had been properly utilised?

In the dark Kanu days of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, we would be chastised, or worse, for complaining about thievery and its contribution to the country’s poverty and underdevelopment. Kenya, we were told, is an island of peace and wealth in a region of chaos, war and poverty. This was tragic conman ship.

South Korea, our erstwhile development peer, was aiming to catch up with Europe in the shortest possible time. And yet here we were inferring great success by comparing ourselves to failed states.

It is not as if we do not have compelling evidence of what thievery does to a country. The Democratic Republic of Congo, fabulously rich in minerals, is a sad, poverty-stricken and broken country because of graft.

The DRC is a study in how thievery affects governance and societal values. Because stealing becomes the only motivation and worthwhile value, officials see their public duties as little more than God-sent opportunities to accumulate personal wealth. All the plans to build clinics, roads, expand the power grid, improve agriculture, etc, become , in reality, just blueprints for theft. The country becomes mired in poverty even as officials acquire mansions in Europe. Militias emerge in regions of the country with weak governance. They, too, begin to steal and exploit the local populations using extreme violence. Communities sink deeper into poverty and despair, and human life becomes of little value.

The people who brought the DRC to that level are not from Mars. They are just like our public officials who are wealthy beyond measure. They are like our county officials diverting public funds into private pockets. It is now clear that the EACC and the Office of Public Prosecutions are overwhelmed by the pervasiveness, insidiousness and scale of corruption. The capacity of these agencies must be increased several fold.

The war against thievery is a war for our existence. Funding for these agencies should reflect the gravity of that reality.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator