Thread by @gathara

To be fair, @MarthaKarua proposed this very thing when she was close to power as Minister for Justice under Kibaki. My questions then are the same now: After how long does corruption qualify as "past" and what is "past" about corruption when we continue paying for it today?

https://twitter.com/tv47ke/status/1389293507160969216

Good to remember that @RailaOdinga too promised an amnesty for "past corruption" during the 2007 election campaigns (when he and @WilliamSRuto were on the same side). gathara.blogspot.com/2007/10/railas…

The fact is, Kenya has had an undeclared amnesty for all corruption, past and present, since independence. Kamau did not go after the colonials and chiefs, Mo1 shielded the Kamaus and their acolytes, and Kibaki talked a good game on corruption but left Mo1 and his friends alone.

What @DavidNdii is proposing is neither new nor a departure from historical practice. There've been calls for a similar amnesty in South Africa and an attempt in Tunisia. Hong Kong is the poster child for a successful one. However, whether it would work here is a different story.

Kenyans generally find it difficult to talk rationally about corruption. This is borne out by proposals to fix it that generally inhabit extremes, veering from public executions to amnesties, and the refusal to address the systemic failures that give rise to and perpetuate graft.

At one level, we can understand why. Corruption is real and raw emotional conversation between victims and perpetrators, with the former demanding vengeance for a century of impoverishment and exploitation, and the latter trying to bury the history of their ill-gotten fortunes.

But we will not be able to deal with corruption in any meaningful way unless we are prepared to have a rational (and no, that does not mean one devoid of emotion) conversation about its roots and about the colonial state that birthed and nurtures it. theelephant.info/features/2018/…

I, for one, would be happy to hear the rationale for proposals such as amnesty if they were in the context of such a conversation. It may, with appropriate conditions, be preferable to a de facto amnesty, which, as we have seen with PEV perps, just leads to more bad behaviour.

I have my doubts, though. "Forgive and forget" has served us poorly in the past. Maybe we ought to try some real justice, both punitive (for the perps) and restorative (for the victims). We should not let Kamau keep lying to us that we have to choose between the two.