EDITORIAL: Corruption is winning because impunity is state policy

Kenya does not suffer from a shortage of laws to fight corruption. It suffers from a surplus of tolerance for it.

Year after year, audit reports expose the same rot—rigged procurement, inflated contracts, unqualified suppliers and billions lost—yet little changes.

Corruption has become routine, predictable and, worst of all, safe for those who perpetrate it.

The loopholes are well known. Procurement systems are bypassed, contracts are varied beyond legal limits and direct procurement is abused to reward insiders.

Oversight exists on paper, but enforcement collapses in practice.

Audit queries gather dust, investigations stall and accountability is endlessly deferred. This is not a systems failure; it is a governance failure.

If Kenya is serious about change, corruption must be made expensive. Procurement officers, accounting officers and political heads must face personal consequences for illegal decisions.

Automatic sanctions should follow clear breaches of procurement and public finance laws. No explanations, no political shielding, no recycling of suspects into new offices.

Technology must also be used aggressively.

Full e-procurement, open contracting data and real-time public access to tender information would close many of the loopholes that allow theft to thrive. Transparency is corruption’s greatest enemy.

But systems alone are not enough. Leadership matters. When leaders excuse theft as “mistakes” or “technicalities,” they legitimise it.

When prosecutions are selective, they entrench impunity. Fighting corruption requires consistency, courage and the willingness to lose political allies in defence of public interest.

Corruption is not an abstract problem. It is why classrooms crack, hospitals lack supplies and roads collapse before they are used. Kenya cannot tax, borrow or pray its way out of corruption.

It must confront it—firmly, fairly and without compromise—before the cost becomes irreversible.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.”—Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States and 1919 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, died on February 3, 1924