The fight against corruption shouldn’t be tribalised

It is common knowledge that the Luo and the Kikuyu of Kenya are like young brothers or sisters who always want to show off at home regardless of who is the elder with utmost influence and control over the other. The struggle for recognition among siblings in homes is always calmed either by their parents, or the eldest at home.

As long as the fight against corruption is mixed with tribal sentiments, we shall not win the battle. The fight against corruption should be a collective responsibility that deserves no politicking. Though feeling the pain caused by corruption is inevitable, we have to continuously contribute to its demise and view the fight as a non-optional undertaking.

We have to implore our mindset and that off all those who trivialise the fight to recognise that it isn’t the rich and abundant legal regime to substitute the social and political will as tools to combat corruption in any serious society. I mean that the government has to do a little more to show us why it shouldn’t be perceived as a pain killer but a healer. If we choose to tribalise the fight against corruption, we ought to know that we are doing nothing better, but only opening a can of worms for genocide as it was almost raising its ugly face on our brothers and sisters in Kenya.

Collective responsibility is the answer to Margaret Wokuri’s question seeking to know the cause of elite corruption in Uganda in her article that appeared in Saturday Monitor of February 6.

We need to note that the causes of elite corruption and any other forms whether petty, or grand corruption range from moral decadence that is as a result of an education system that has failed to address the prevailing employment needs of the population; lies told by conceiving mothers that the embryos they carry demand for land titles and cars; absentee parents and remote control parenting systems that are as a result of a communist and abnormally busy society; electronic parenting that is manifested by e-mail and telephone parents that are now a substitute for what we went through as a normal ethical molding that a youngster deserves in this country.

More so, commercialisation of education and religion has not only increased the causes of corruption, but played a role to create more confusion about knowing what is right and wrong. Wokuri ought to know that it isn’t scarcity of goods as was in the Amin era, but rather scarcity of role models and citizens of morals to differentiate between sin and sinners.

Whether corruption is as a result of sins committed by omission or commission, a sin remains an act that distances us from authority. Though goods and services could be in plenty for those who could afford and are at the same time viewed as corrupt, one needs to know that a poor man can’t be corrupted by anything. A rich man with something should do something to stop corruption.

While we live in a busy environment, corruption still exists in the mind of people who are full of treacherous spirits that continue to embed them in the presence of sin while knowing that in such a situation, the power of sin was taken away by the presence of Jesus Christ, who continues to be used as a symbol even by the corrupt in churches and elsewhere.

Taking it from the biblical point of view, recollecting how Moses was given the laws which were written on the door spots for whoever wanted entry into the house to read should apply to all our office and institution doors to bear codes and messages that remind whoever enters to read and change the mindset.

Mr Kaboyo is the executive director of the Coalition of Uganda Private School Teachers Association
Coalitionmovers2003@yahoo.com