At Cross Purposes With Our Social Norms - Our Reaction To The News Of The NYS Scandal Contradicts The Values We Communicate

Every Kenyan I know is stewing over the National Youth Service (NYS) scandal where it is reported that amounts in excess of 9 Billion Kenyan Shillings were looted. But I believe that this is a reflection of what is happening in many parts of the country and at all levels of interaction. The curse of corruption is endemic and in many situations, it is the case that being ethical has no perceivable benefits, other than a clear conscience. It has become a classical game theory problem whereby you lose if you act ethically while everyone else is exploiting every unethical edge at their disposal. We are in a lose-lose situation as illustrated in the diagram below.  

One big flaw we have as a society is that we venerate the wealthy without regard for how they achieved their opulence. On the other hand, we seem to have very little appreciation for people who make personal sacrifices for the sake of the country. If we do, we have a very poor way of showing it and it does not stay on our minds for long. We should honor and appreciate our police officers, teachers and farmers more.  The problem as I see it is that we are not communicating that we value any of the sacrifices that are necessary for propelling a country forward. The kind of sacrifices that the Mau Mau fighters made -  abandoning personal comfort and risking their lives so that future generations would see a better day. Our enamorment with ostentatious shows of wealth forces politicians to budget for unnecessary things like travel in helicopters in order to attract crowds and be seriously considered for election. This is why people like Boniface Mwangi lose in the elections. 

Much of the discussion I have seen around the NYS scandal has been the emotive and sentimental response you expect to get after a revelation of this kind of magnitude. The piece that is missing is the cold and analytical view that research brings to our understanding. This is the realm that I believe our universities and research institutions should dive into. With the recent creation of county governments, we have a need for researchers to collect data on different variables such as available resources, level of unity or acrimony in the local governments, the cultural beliefs of a region, the severity of punishment for corruption, the extent to which the laws are enforced and so much more. Once this data is collected and analyzed we should be able to compare and contrast the 47 counties and come up with educated recommendations on tackling corruption. 

Policy gurus and economics researchers should also be engaged in studies to determine how to create incentives for desirable behavior from the grassroots up.  In most ancestral communities, courage, hard work and self-sacrifice were celebrated and rewarded. The brave Maasai Moran who risked his life by fighting a lion to defend his cattle was admired by the entire community. We need to find ways to make it desirable to serve the community using both government policy and social rewards. On the flip side, we also need to examine our disincentives for social ills such as corruption. In the Kamba community, there was a curse pronounced on thieves called ‘Kithito’. If someone, for example, used an advantage to muscle a neighbor out of their property, the aggrieved party would take a clay pot and dash it against the ground signifying that the same thing would happen to the person who committed the crime if they were guilty. This together with other social disincentives was a strong deterrent to unwanted behavior. Today we need modern deterrents that resonate strongly with all the communities.

For those who think that it is impossible to influence the habits and behaviors of an entire nation, Charles Duhigg in his book ‘The Power of Habit’ narrates how this was done in the USA in the early 1940s. During WW2 the US government began shipping much of the nations meat supply to Europe to support the troops. This led to a situation where New York restaurants started using horse meat for hamburgers and a black market for poultry emerged. The department of defense recruited dozens of the nation’s leading sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists and gave them the assignment to figure out how to convince Americans to eat organ meats. Get housewives to serve their families the protein-rich livers, hearts, kidneys, brains, stomachs, and intestines that were left behind after the steaks and pork loins went overseas. The problem was that at the time, organ meat was not popular in America. So when the Committee on Food Habits met for the first time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. The result was that offal consumption rose 33 percent during the war and was up by 50 percent by 1955.

My former classmate from the University of Nairobi recently shared with our year’s WhatsApp group the google impact challenge document for Kenyan businesses and non-profit organizations. Here is a link to the I hope that one of the institutions that are awarded a grant will be one that focusses on social science research. I am optimistic about the future of Kenya, but it will take all hands on deck to combat corruption.