The President’s position, enunciated in his State of the Nation address yesterday, is a departure from his position in 2015.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has basically lowered the standard.
In 2015, Uhuru had said that all those who were under active investigation should step aside. Many of those actually did so. He tabled the List of Shame in Parliament after his address.
This time around, the President is saying that unless you are charged in court, you can stay put in my Cabinet and my government.
So, he has lowered the standard: Retreated back to the criminal standard and abandoned the ethical standard. The criminal standard is the lowest.
This standard seeks to determine whether one is guilty or innocent for punishment as provided in the criminal law.
That is the purpose of criminal law.
But if it is about leadership, which our Constitution defines as a trust, the criminal standard cannot be applicable.
The proper standard is an ethical standard. We struggle as a country to ascertain what the ethical standard is but it is clearly not low as the criminal standard.
People should be able to leave their jobs and at the very bminimum, they should be able to step aside until those who are under investigation are cleared.
This is because immediately an investigating file is opened, the trust and the confidence Kenyans had to entrust you with your position is already under attack.
The only way to restore it is to show respect to the people whom you serve and to step aside to show you recognise the seriousness of the investigations that are going on.
If you are cleared, you should be able to go back to your office. The impact of the President’s position is that there is no paradigm shift. It's still business as usual.
Nothing much will change unless we shift gears and adopt a much tougher and more pragmatic standard of integrity in public service.
We know that not everybody who ought to be charged in court will ever be charged in court.
Of all the crooks around, there is only a small number that will ever be charged in court.
The more politically connected you are the more economically persuasive you are in this country.
The Transparency International-Kenya Executive Director spoke to the Star
