Politics and morality are mutually exclusive in Kenya.
You will be out of your mind if you were seen seeking morality from our political elite. Our country lacks any known value system. Generally, our politics is unhygienic; corruption is up there, and big honour is derived in cheating or stealing public resources.
We live in a country that has its own pressure; the pressure for personal success and the pressure for others to see you as a success story, especially in political terms.
Even sadder is that we have started placing academic certificates where they don’t belong. Everyone on the street wants to have a degree, but, again, as a country, we have made no effort to develop a link between such a certificate and ability.
There is every reason to sympathise with Oscar Sudi, the Kapseret MP. In an environment where every other person is flaunting a bachelor and master’s degree they hardly deserve, the MP may have felt compelled to obtain certificates that would have suited his level.
Yet, MP Sudi is not alone in this infamy. His case is just a tip of the iceberg, because all these politicians, elected, unelected and aspirants, I can bet my last shilling, have serious questions surrounding their academic qualifications. The situation is so bad that I suspect many of them have either forged or gone to other great extra-legal lengths to acquire such papers.
But, in my view, the case of forged academic papers is not the worst. After all, getting a degree in Kenya has become easy. There are all manner of universities, in every corner of the street, that issue them even if the learners awarded will never have been in class.
My problem is that in Kenya, we have developed the bad habit of mixing integrity and criminal issues. We have equated the two to be one and the same thing. Much as they related, they are totally different.
For good measure, the threshold of criminal culpability is high. This is because it’s guided by the reading of the law and procedural issues that must be attained before the court renders its verdict.
In my view, Sudi should already have lost his seat as an MP on the basis of the latest revelations, if integrity questions were properly applied. Where integrity is valued, suspicion is enough to force one out of office.
- Manyora is a political analyst and teaches at the University of Nairobi.