E-Clips:- Business Pictorial - We Are Not Yet Out Of Corruption Woods

Five years ago on a visit to Dubai, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my driver was a Swahili from Zanzibar.

I was even more impressed when the government guide showed me around the country: The fantastic roads, the yacht club, the millionaire all-suite hotel, the harbour (which he informed me was the only man-made feature, apart from the Great Wall of China, which could be seen from the moon. Have we been back to the moon since 1969?): The whole visionary, aggressive and very clever marketing and development of the country.

But our driver, a cynical man, was listening with a deadpan face and would take the earliest opportunity to demolish the government mans sales talk.

"Everything here is fake," he told me. "The soil, the plants, the wild animals, even the army. Imports, all of them." The Dubai army, he told me, had been full of mercenaries from Zanzibar and the Kenyan coast, until it was mobilised to fight in the first Gulf War. "We mutinied. We had come here to make money, not to be shot in the desert," he said.

He was extremely entertaining and friendly, if not exactly a source of accurate information on a beautiful, prosperous and generally fantastic country.

But his theory, uninformed and biased as he was, about the way the Dubai economy works, I felt, had some merit. It is like a fire, he said, fanned by oil dollars. When the oil runs out, will the fire be extinguished? I have a feeling that the Dubai economy has very little to do with oil these days and is driven by commerce and tourism. But the man was referring to an important concept, sustainability. And it brings me to one of the points I wanted to make today.

Official corruption, corruption that is perpetrated by officers of the government, is the greatest danger to the welfare, survival and prosperity of the Kenyan people.

By using their offices and state power, such officers remove resources from the public pool and convert them to disposable income, which is used to maintain a string of mistresses, homes abroad, huge juggernauts and "businesses".

I use businesses advisedly. A lot of these graft billionaires are only theoretical business people. And they are only rich in a theoretical and transient sense. Because the money is stolen and put in grand schemes that are not well thought out and do not have the normal systems that ordinarily sustain a business.

Putting money in these so-called investments is actually not investment at all, but part of the twisted consumerist characteristics of the graft economy. They neither create employment for long nor wealth for the nation.

In other words, I do not believe that there can ever be economic benefits from corruption and public money that is pumped into the corruption pipe to fan an egotistical illusion of wealth and is ultimately squandered and therefore lost. As to the costs, well, look at your own life. And your payslip. You are paying tax to repay debts that another man most probably used to sustain a mistress.

Which is why when the news of the Sh2.7 billion passports scandal broke, my heart fell. What was at risk was not just money, even though that was an important consideration, it was our very belief in this country.

Kenyans fought dictatorship and monolithism for so many years in the belief that it was possible to form a government free of official corruption. Narc made many commitments to be that government. The revelations of scandal on a billion shilling scandal is, in my mind, ample evidence that this country is still in grave danger.

The sacking of Mr Joseph Magari and the rest, as well as the assurances that the government has given that the matter is being thoroughly investigated and more heads will roll, provide a little reassurance.

But for us in the media and for the taxpayer in general, the war has just started. If we take our eyes off the ball even for one second, this country will be totally destroyed.

For you must never be so stupid as to be carried away by the flashy lives of the graft billionaires. When the fan is switched off, that fire definitely goes out.