CORRUPTION & SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS - A RUMINATION ON THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION 'MISSING FUNDS' SCANDAL

 

A picture of a poor woman in the hunger striken turukana region of northern Kenya

An indigent and destitute woman goes to the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) office in Kasarani Constituency, Nairobi (a fund created by the CDF Act Cap 10 of 2003, whose purpose is for development and in particular in the fight against poverty at the constituency level. ……). Her son has been threatened with expulsion from a local Secondary School for the habitual default in school fees payment. The arrears are in the tens of thousands and her only wish is to reduce the amount hoping against hope that an upcoming business idea will soon come to fruition. It has been a while now since she paid any fees for her son and the patient head teacher has been extremely considerate of her plight, but then again the school cannot run on prayers.....

Down in the sprawling Korogocho slums, the number of young boys and girls, many who are friends of her son, haven’t seen the inside of a class room ever since they were chased for fees a few years back. The level of prostitution and crime in the area is a clear reflection of where this desperate community is headed. The number of children in school is what zoologists would call “an endangered species”. She definitely wouldn’t want her son to join these statistics and so her quest for reprieve drives her to insurmountable heights….lengths and depths.

And so she visits the CDF office anticipating that the office established by the MP she vehemently campaigned for will empathize with her, and help bear her burden. She finds an officer at the office and quickly pours out her tribulations and misfortunes, mainly due to the fact that there are tens of other people, waiting in line to get the officer’s ear and get a morsel of the kitty, and she too has had to wait for a few hours to get into the office. She quickly estimates her problems to be worth Kshs. 30,000 and manages a smile hoping that notes will come flying out of the officer’s pockets – she even sees swollen pockets as a result of her hope and desperation!

The officer disappointingly says that she cannot be given such an amount considering the number of people standing outside with similar problems. He settles on Kshs. 3,000 (the criterion he used; only he knows). She tries to argue her case but realizes that she is likely to miss out on even that little amount. She quickly signs for the cash, begrudgingly of course, and rushes off to the son’s school promising that more is on the way, just as she has been doing for the past few years.   

A few days later, there are rumors going round the constituency are that officers at the CDF office have been embezzling funds and tampering with figures. Though exhausted as a result of her misery, she rushes off to the office to confirm this. There she finds a crowd, baying for the head of the officer who has been manning the office, the MPs number is not going through either. She eventually gains access to the office and inspects the records of amounts issued. She is perturbed – traumatized in fact, to find out that the money she got from her visit was actually the whole Kshs. 30,000. She is speechless, she, among other women threaten to strip naked and cause a spectacle if their cry for vengeance is not heard.

****Well a few weeks ago I read in the dailies that a man from Kasarani Constituency, had been arraigned in court facing an assortment of corruption related charges ***

Incidences of this kind are certainly not new. Every other week reports of corruption abound. Embezzlement of funds, fraud, falsification of documents, theft by agent, forgery etc, by public officers / or officers charged with managing public coffers is indeed rife.

I was therefore taken aback to the story I have just narrated when I heard about the current scandal where tens of millions are missing and/or unaccounted for by the Education Ministry. Accusations and counter accusations abound about where the funds are with donors assuring government of their intent to pull out on any bilateral agreements to fund the education sector – grave decision indeed.  

Grave, not in the sense that, the government will loose money from its coffers, treasury will be rendered broke….blah, blah blah….., but grave in a sense that in many of these cases goes unmentioned – and which at this point, albeit in a brief way, I beg to address.

Article 43 of the Constitution of Kenya – a progressive provision of economic and social rights – lists; the highest attainable standard of health, adequate housing, freedom from hunger, clean and safe water, social security and education, as rights that every person is entitled to.

Those who penned down these provisions were aware of the challenges in this implementation, the potential tsunami of litigations that would result, but were more importantly alive to the fact that the same would be addressed progressively with proper allocation and accountability of public funds. They were further alive to the need to set up proper institutions to fight corruption and promote accountability and hence subsequent provisions in Article 79 recommending the establishment of the Ethics and Anti – corruption Commission, similar to the South African Constitution imposing the obligation on state to establish the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI).

The effects of corruption on the citizenry cannot be overemphasized. Malnutrition due to lack of food as a result of a ‘maize scandal’, increase in prices of commodities as a result of the ‘oil scandal’, lack of enough money to fund the free basic education program as a result of the ‘ministry of education- missing funds scandal’ etc are all examples that show a deliberate attempt to deprive the poor Kenyan citizen of these very important rights.

*****I am currently working on a research paper on the criminalization of corruption and its relation to the realization of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Kenya which I hope to soon share with you ********

It is within our might as Kenyan citizens to fight this vice – our mothers, daughters and sisters may have to strip naked to have the issues highlighted and addressed, our men folk may have to do likewise in addition to using their husky voices to shout down corruption and their male strength and resilience to march in protest against the vice. It is a fight we cannot let go to stale!