MAL38:20 | Page 5

a human catastrophe for Africa given our poor health infrastructure and social safety nets .

The virus exists in Africa but the impact of the pandemic is just a fraction of what was anticipated and unbelievably the continent is weathering the corona storm a lot better than many developed countries . But that is not a reason for us to let our guard down .

The saying that every cloud has a silver lining or that every problem has an opportunity cannot be that those sayings meant that callous Kenyan would take advantage of such a serious problem and find a way to personally profit from the scourge .

The Covid billionaires are just another blight in the Kenyan national pride and international image . We have become used to the shadowy characters that luck mysteriously near the seats of power at the national and county levels that control the flow of money in Kenya .

When they do land in court you find the names of nobodies that have won lucrative government tenders and even companies that had been formed days to the issue of the tender . These clumsy thieves imagine that Kenyans are so foolish to not realize they are just fronts for the real conmen .

But they continue to front the real thieves in government with impunity because the justice system is so compromised and rotten that the culprits will be busy creating new companies to replace those that have been flagged by the media and the game goes on .

We have stated in the past and we restate it again that the level of corruption in this country is so high that economic crimes need to be made capital offences because stealing public money has become a national pastime and the counties have learnt the same making a mockery of the spirit of devolution .

In this particular instance it surely is despicable to steal from the dying and to jeopardize the lives of frontline workers by supplying substandard protective equipment or not supplying any at all . Is this not akin to murder , just how serious is our moral poverty ?

So while the whole world was busy trying to flatten the curve , Kenyans were busy lifting the curve and to date we are not even sure whether the daily figures of Covid infections and recoveries are not just made up figures to justify the continued looting .

When a country leadership becomes so insensitive to its populace and cartels have the country by the throat and continue to commit crimes that are never brought to book then whatever legacy the President imagines he wishes to leave will all go up in smoke .

This regime shall be remembered as the government that oversaw the impoverishment of Kenyans as a few privileged thugs stole the money that was supposed to cushion the impact of the pandemic . In this calamitous period , the rich got richer not by productivity but by theft .

The ogre of corruption has risen to new levels in this regime , is that the legacy they want to leave as a result of the handshake ? Was peace bought at a price of massive corruption ? Were we pretending to flatten the corona curve by raising the corruption curve ?

Nothing this regime does will erase that perception unless decisive action is taken to bring the culprits both at the national and county levels to book . Fortunately they still have time to redeem their legacy but that time is running out fast !