Kenya’s true battle is between the Creative and the Corrupt

Beyond political and technical declarations at the end of what, at least in process terms, has been a successful forum, a couple of things struck me during this week’s UNCTAD 14 conference in Nairobi.

First, the traffic gridlock that ensued around the city simply because our Central Business District was effectively closed down suggests that we really need to decongest our capital city. Why not locate our Parliament in Nakuru or Eldoret? Or our Supreme Court in Kisumu or Mombasa?

While this is not the straight answer to the conference-enforced traffic logjam we experienced, it does recall the Vision 2030 idea of “resort cities”, which presumably include world-class conference facilities?

While we’re at it, why should Nairobi be our “political” capital? Given increasing global interest in locating here as a “regional hub”, shouldn’t this great city simply be our business and commercial capital, a la Lagos (the seventh largest economy in Africa, as our very own Kenyan Harvard Professor Calestous Juma noted in a brilliant piece on the continent’s opportunities vis-à-vis globalization)?

Sadly, the draft national spatial plan on the Ministry of Lands and Housing website lacks this creative imagination. Wouldn’t Nanyuki, apparently our “central point by geography” be a great capital. But, mostly, wouldn’t such decongestion accelerate our long-needed process of “spreading the wealth”?

The second thing that struck me about UNCTAD 14 was the specific forums that involved young people, firstly through a formal Youth Forum, and second, through a televised panel and public discussion on the Creative Economy. I followed part of the broadcast and was suitably impressed by the debate.

But before we talk about our creative economy, let’s discuss our corruption economy, which also took up a few headlines during the week. As I have said before, the answer to our corruption “monster” must be disruptive thinking. To loosely quote Albert Einstein’s famous observation “one cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place”. This we know.

However, what we have today could have been described by Karl Marx thus “Kenya’s corruption history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”. Let’s look at some of the farcical stuff from this week.
First, we have a situation where one Anglo Leasing case was unable to proceed because, reportedly, lawyers for the defence argued that the prosecution had not provided various relevant documents and was, to quote, “unprepared for the case”. The mind boggles; subjudice prevents my further comment.

Let’s look at other jigsaw puzzles. The huge sucking sound we heard this week was more on National Youth Service (NYS). The EACC clears certain suspects of involvement in the scam. The DPP, following investigations by the DCI, presumably supported by the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA), charges other suspects in court, but the case continues to suffer all sorts of technical delays.

Then it is revealed that the EACC Chair is associated with a company that did business with NYS. The other EACC commissioners then write to the DPP, DCI and ARA to conduct investigations on their Chair. Accusations all around. Protests of innocence. Refusal to resign. Tragedy has become farce.

Lest we forget, we still haven’t heard the last on the Eurobond. The Auditor-General’s consolidated report for 2014/15 is now several months late, reportedly because forensic audits around the Eurobond and Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) is incomplete. Hence the “piecemeal” submissions to Parliament that we read about.

This is the same Auditor-General the credibility of whose most recent forensic audit reports have now been questioned by the Judiciary and IEBC. The same IEBC cleared by Parliament’s Justice and Legal Affairs Committee but whose mandate is still being reviewed by another Parliamentary committee.

Corruption has now mutated

Just in case we’re all totally confused by now, remember the Auditor-General recently produced a forensic audit on NYS that showed that monies lost were far higher than originally envisaged.

Let’s be clear. I am not accusing anyone here, but this “murky” business called corruption has now mutated into a “merry-go-round”, akin to those that recently vetted Policemen used to explain their unusually fat bank accounts. But when corruption becomes a “super-chama” then we are all doomed.

And I am not even talking about a quote in the press attributed to the immediate former Inspector-General of Police that “only corrupt individuals survive working for the current regime”.

This is probably why former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga regularly opined that “corruption has its own Vision 2030” (isn’t Vision 2030 premised on less corruption?). It’s almost as if “something is rotten in the state of Kenya”, as we may surmise from Shakepeare’s Hamlet.

Which brings me back to the creative economy. The narrow view in discussions about this economy centres around areas such as film, literature, art and crafts, design, fashion, music, publishing, theatre and performing arts, and this seemed to reflect in some of the discussions I observed.

The wider definition, first offered by British academic, author and speaker Professor John Howkins in 2001, attracts me far more. In his simple words, “a creative economy is based on people’s use of their creative imagination to increase an idea’s value”. If I dreamily think about a negative such as corruption, then it’s also about creative imagining that reduces vice.

In this way, we’re talking not just about traditional expressions of culture and arts but more about everything daring, digital and disruptive…from “m-pesa” (and “m-others”) to “ushahidi” to “little cabs” to the “XYZee show” to value transformation in traditional sectors such as transport, housing, education, health and environmental protection as well as government service and corruption.

Taking this thought experiment to its logical end, is Kenya’s escape from corruption (and poor governance) – as we pursue an inclusive path of growth and development - located in a creative economy that not only stands on its own, but disrupts the status quo?

After all – and I deliberately generalize here – isn’t corruption about the older in society, and creativity about our youth? This might be our moment for “Peter Pan” thinking, as UNCTAD 14 told me this week.

Kabaara is a management consultant
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