State becoming less transparent

“An opaque process cannot produce a transparent result” a friend said recently, which explains much about Kenya’s bureaucratic-executive state.

It’s more than six months since the President made a public commitment that he would make the standard gauge railway (SGR) contract public. Despite this public commitment, the government is holding tight to the contract.

In a recent presser, Transport Secretary James Macharia said that his office has actually released the contract to the public and given it to the media. When put to task to specify which media house or journalist, his memory failed him.

What was more surprising is a comment he made in that presser saying that there is no need for the media to even read the contract itself because it’s just a standard contract just like any other, which meets international standards.

This is what drafters of the Constitution foresaw when they made watertight provisions concerning disclosure of information to the public - what we call transparency, an unresponsive government easily gets away with mis-governance and mismanagement.

The virtue of transparency is that when powerful institutions are exposed to public scrutiny, it disinfects them and brings about a more effective, responsive and democratic regulatory state. But the more light of public scrutiny is shone on powerful institutions, the more they feel their functions and legitimacy is threatened and desperately choose to be repressive and abusive

The question that confronts us about the SGR contract was stated by former US president Abraham Lincoln more than 150 years ago: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

But lack of transparency in the Jubilee administration doesn’t end with the SGR contract.

Last week, Kenya signed a deal with Turkana oil exploration firms that will see them source up to Sh300 billion funding from international financiers.

Petroleum Secretary John Munyes declined to share copies of the contract with the media, saying it will be kept secret from taxpayers.

In the same casual dismissal of accountability, he told journalists that they didn’t need to worry about the details of the deal because it had taken good care of Kenyans’ interests.

The Constitution imagined exploitation and abuse of power and therefore committed the nation to a legal regime that promotes transparency to make public institutions stronger. But the Jubilee government is hell-bent on continuities of bureaucratic–authoritarianism of the old constitutional dispensation, a dangerous precedence for future governments - the deliberate failure to live up to the spirit and letter of the constitution in regard to transparency and accountability.

This blatant impunity of the Executive operating without restraint and public scrutiny is largely due to Parliament’s oversight failure.

There is virtually abdication of Parliament’s oversight responsibility, the central instrument for Executive accountability and responsibility, encouraging abuse of power, mismanagement and authoritarianism.

Another clear example is when Kenya in May floated a third Eurobond issue raising Sh210 billion, without Parliament’s involvement or Parliament even seeing the Eurobond prospectus. And Parliament till date has not even bothered to raise the issue with the Executive.

So, for how long will the Executive overreach in blatant disregard to the legal regime of transparency and accountability continue?

Its instructive upon Kenyans to note that an opaque government can only produce the results of government abuses and bureaucratic-authoritarianism, not a democratic, accountable and progressive government. That is the quandary they find themselves in today.