Corruption knows no age group

Kenya is an increasingly youthful nation. The Youth is the single largest percentage of the country’s population. Indeed, the term the youth bulge is an accurate depiction of the country’s demograghics. Those below 35 years of age is about 80 percent of the country’s population. It, consequently means that plans, policies and strategies must be alive to and respond to this reality in the country’s demographics.

A few weeks ago, while attending a passout parade at the National Youth Service, President Uhuru Kenyatta mentioned an aspect of the youth bulge that raised eyebrows amongst the youth. Responding to a concern on why he had appointed former vice-president Moody Awori to a board dealing with youth issues, he quipped that with young people having disappointed him by looting those resources, he had no option but to entrust the responsibility for stewardship to an older person. Expectedly several young people were not amused.

Was the President indicating that corruption had become a preserve of the youth? The misuse of public resources in the country has reached alarming proportions. To the extent that a survey undertaken by the Aga Khan Institute showed that majority of young people had no qualms about get rich schemes, seeing as their role model people who had made money quickly even if the source of the wealth was corrupt practices. Consequently, the public action in 2018 to try and curb the rampant corruption in the country is commendable. However, it cannot be that this corruption resides amongst the youth.

However, the President may have been passing a different message. It may be a message of frustration with the youth and young leaders. For long, the mantra used to be that the youth were the leaders of tomorrow. Until around a decade ago, the age of the country’s leadership was both old and tired.

I remember being part of a process to develop the first strategic plan for the Kenyan Young Parliamentarians Association (KYPA). The retreat for this purpose had an invitation list for members who fit into the ‘age bracket” then loosely defined as those below 45 years of age. Even with this expanded definition we still could not identify more than 50 members. The organisers even became more flexible allowing a few extra years as long as one was below 50 years of age.

The drive towards increase in the number of young people in leadership has borne fruit. Currently, KYPA has more than fifty members and the age bracket respects the constitutional definition of youth, being those below thirty-five years of age. We have made this progress as a country in only one decade.

Despite these developments, it is necessary to remember that the quest for youth leadership was not solely to increase the numbers of young people occupying leadership position.

It was a desire to improve the quality of leadership in the country. For a country, where the majority of its population was young, for a world which was increasingly technology driven, leadership required to reflect this demographic reality and respond to this technological status.

The hope was that this would lead to more responsive leadership and faster and equitable development in the country. However, the reality points to a different picture.

The NYS scandals have demonstrated that even youth programmes are not spared of graft. While it is not just young people who have been culpable in this and other financial misappropriations, the fact that even when they have been entrusted with the custody of public resources, they have not been good stewards, leads to the frustration that the President expressed recently.

The solution though is not to pass blanket condemnation of the youth. Neither is it for the youth to dismiss the President’s concerns. Rather, it is to recognise that graft knows no age barrier and has to be fought consistently. In addition, since the youth form the bulk of the population, strategies to address this malaise must appreciate and take into account the reality of the youth bulge in Kenya.

Young leaders have the responsibility of setting a more ethical standard to be emulated. They must recognise that engaging in plunder of public resources is not just criminal, it also gives the entire youth fraternity a bad name. It denies the youth positive role models, compromises the future of the country and justifies the appointment of people who are past their retirement age.