Deputy President William Ruto has addressed the million dollar question that has been surfacing the political scene.
The war on graft has been so intense with his allies claiming that President Uhuru Kenyatta is targetting DP Ruto, others went ahead claiming that DCI Kinoti and DPP Haji are Uhuru’s errand boys.
While speaking during the opening of the First Inter-Professionals Summit in Mombasa he said that the war on graft is meant to target specific people for political reasons.
“There has been an attempt to hijack the war on corruption and turn it into a war against specific individuals. In the attempt to wage this convoluted version of the war on corruption, many government programmes and projects, as well as many innocent public servants, have become casualties,” Ruto said.
In addition he said, “A war on corruption that lacks integrity ceases to be a war on corruption and becomes corruption itself. A war that lacks integrity is impunity. An integrity war waged selectively, using convenient half-truths, with political outcomes in mind, is impunity.”
DP Ruto further asked the people in power of any kind to promote ethics and integrity and lead by example.
“Corruption involving misappropriation and embezzlement of public funds entails an understanding among and between accountants, auditors, economists and such professionals to see to it that budgets are diverted and misused.”
He said Kenyans must move from broad generalities and begin to examine the contributions of specific professionals to corruption.
“Accountants who manipulate numbers, occasioning loss of value in the public and private sectors; surveyors and planners who facilitate expropriation of public land in shoddy and corrupt schemes; human resource managers who skew interviews and promotions and sacrifice merit at the shrine of tribalism, and qualification on the altar of nepotism are to blame for corruption.”
He said wayward lawyers promote judicial corruption, adding that a bad decision procured for a valuable reward requires lawyers willing to negotiate terms and coordinate modalities by which the justice is perverted.
“Judges who auction justice to the highest bidder, consigning innocent people to untold suffering and media practitioners who file fake stories influenced by brown envelopes are part of the mess in this country.”
The DP said bad roads are a direct consequence of corrupt dealings involving engineers who compromise designs, allow poor supervision, permit shortcuts, or approve substandard work.