It is official. The government has declared that it is perfectly in order for police officers to ask for cash before they can respond to your distress calls.
According to Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, it is common knowledge that under-funded police stations often exhaust their monthly fuel budgets before the next cycle of disbursements; so it is only natural that anyone calling for help sends money for petrol.
That the man who holds one of the most powerful Cabinet dockets in Kenya—comprising national security, the national government administration behemoth, and a whole host of other departments, making him second in influence only to the presidency—does not see corruption in such demands is not surprising.
He represents the dominant mindset in President William Ruto’s administration where justification is always provided for graft.
Under this administration, corruption has been so normalised that nobody in authority is troubled by a scale of theft and plunder that leaves the government too broke to pay its bills or to fund essential services.
Collecting bribes from matatus
Mr Murkomen genuinely cannot see that citizens being asked to fuel police vehicles will naturally extend to demands for lunch money and other expenses before officers respond to alarm calls.
Corruption in the National Police Service is legendary, a deeply ingrained culture. On every street, police officers appear to go beyond the call of duty by so diligently being on duty from early morning until late into the night.
Everyone knows that they are not controlling traffic, but collecting bribes from matatus and trucks, or private motorists who may be at fault for expired driving licenses or driving defective vehicles.
The bribes collected daily run into billions; and are not just for the roadside cops as the takings are shared up the chain of command to the police station commanders and all the way up to headquarters.
This has been taken as normal by a government that sees it as a justifiable enterprise to supplement the meagre salaries of police officers.
But they do not see the correlation in Kenya being a world leader in the proportion of police officers on traffic duties, and also setting the pace in road accident fatalities.
Much-maligned police service
It is the corruption that turns a blind eye to dangerous and reckless driving, complete disregard of traffic rules, and high proportion of unroadworthy jalopies, that is directly responsible for the death toll on our roads.
The corruption that requires citizens to pay under the table for police services will ensure that only the wealthy will have their distress calls answered. The poor are on their own.
It will also extend to police officers not just appearing at a scene of crime, but expecting additional facilitation so that outcomes of their investigations will be determined by how much one can pay.
We are moving to the stage where the government will accept as normal that we further supplement the earnings of police officers by paying so that they arrest and charge a business rivals, threaten that pesky neighbour with whom you have a boundary dispute, or take out of circulation that fellow who seems about to steal the heart of your beloved.
We are not talking about that cop on the beat, but an entire institution where corruption becomes the ingrained culture.
And we are not limiting ourselves to the much-maligned police service, but the entire government edifice, starting with State House, which has become the nerve centre for theft of public funds towards private political purposes under the massive voter bribery presently being witnessed.
There has been a lot of anger, and rightly so, on school children in Kilifi being made to recite Hare Krishna chants so they could benefit from a school feeding programme funded by the religious group.
No children anywhere should be forced to observe or participate in rituals of a religion not of their choice. The Hare Krishna movement was exploiting poverty and ignorance to spread its gospel by the most unethical means.
But let’s face it, most of those expressing outrage actually have no problem at all with religious indoctrination of that nature. Their beef is that it was an “alien” faith rather than one of their own beliefs.
Majority of them are, in fact, victims, and at the same time strong proponents, of religious indoctrination.
Centuries of foreign occupation by Arab, Portuguese and British invaders came with forced conversion to foreign faiths, to which we adhere to this day.
