There is a particular humiliation that has become so routine we have stopped asking why it exists. You queue at an embassy. You fill in forms. You submit bank statements, proof of employment, a letter explaining why you want to travel and, more importantly, why you will return. You pay a non-refundable fee for the privilege of being told no.
Not too long ago, Kenyans could travel to the United Kingdom without a visa. You bought a ticket and just hopped on a flight. The bilateral arrangement operated on a basic assumption of good faith: Kenya was a country whose citizens would, by and large, travel and return.
Then a small number of officials in positions of trust decided their private financial interest was more important than that assumption.
Kenyan passports began appearing in the hands of Somali nationals seeking to circumvent restrictions that applied to them but not to us. It was lucrative for those involved but catastrophic for everyone else. Thirty years later, the Kenyan passport still carries the cost of that calculation.
The cost of their decision is being paid by every Kenyan who has been denied entry, missed a contract, watched a foreign counterpart move freely while they navigated bureaucratic obstacles, or felt the quiet indignity of being treated as a suspect before being treated as a person.
Thomas Sankara, speaking about resource allocation in Burkina Faso in 1986, issued a warning that African leaders have spent four decades refusing to hear. “We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all.” Sankara saw it as a choice. He was right about the choice. He was, however, optimistic about its nature. The leaders who followed him across this continent did not weigh champagne against water in any deliberate calculation. They were simply greedy, and the structural damage arrived regardless of intent.
Kenya’s officials sold those passports for personal gain without accounting for what 40 million people would lose in return. The weakened travel document for an entire nation arrived as a bill they would never personally pay. This is what economists call the externalisation of costs. The benefit of corruption is private, while the cost is paid by a generation.
We talk about corruption in Kenya almost entirely as a moral question. Preachers condemn it. Politicians campaign against it while practising it. Civil society produces reports. Nothing changes because the framing is wrong.
Corruption is not, at its root, a failure of character. It is a structural miscalculation with geopolitical consequences. When a country’s institutions are weak, its negotiating position is weak. When its passport is weak, its citizens are weak.
A weak country does not negotiate with stronger economies from a position of partnership. It takes whatever terms are offered.
This is why Africa, despite holding 30 per cent of the world’s mineral resources, despite its accelerating youth population, despite agricultural land that much of the world would consider a strategic asset, continues to receive foreign direct investment on terms that would be rejected outright in Frankfurt or Singapore. We arrive at every table with weak institutions and wonder why the deals reflect that weakness.
The political elite in this country believe they are exempt. A cabinet secretary acquires a second passport. A minister’s child studies abroad on wealth extracted from the same institutions they hollowed out. What they do not account for is that the passport they weakened still belongs to their constituents, their business partners and the investors they need to attract.
More critically, the institutional rot they cultivated to protect themselves is the same rot that makes their contracts unenforceable, their wealth insecure and their political survival hostage to whoever holds power on any given morning.
Rigathi Gachagua spent a decade accumulating proximity to power. It took a single afternoon in Parliament to dismantle it. The machinery that removed him was built from the same weak institutional timber Kenya’s political class has spent decades preserving because it was convenient. It is still convenient. The question is always, convenient to whom, and for how long.
Strong institutions are not a gift we extend to the poor. A judiciary that is genuinely independent shields the businessman from an overreaching state as surely as it shields the tenant from a connected landlord.
A passport that commands respect allows an executive to close a deal without losing weeks to visa queues. A civil service that functions creates the conditions in which investment is possible and contracts are enforceable.
Sankara’s choice was presented as a moral appeal. The urgency is actually strategic. You cannot build a country on the assumption that the powerful will always be able to purchase their way out of the consequences of weakening it.
At some point, and African history offers no shortage of examples, the powerful discover that the prison they built for everyone else has no special exit reserved for them.
Mr Amenya is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and a startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
