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What does the Kimunya saga mean to Tanzania?
2008-07-10 10:18:13
By Editor
Finally, embattled Kenyan finance minister Amos Kimunya has thrown the towel, after causing a big furore within the coalition government when he was implicated in a controversial sale of a government-owned hotel.
For more than a week after the scandal had unfolded, and as political tempers were fast rising to no-return level, Mr Kimunya simply dug in and clung to his job, telling those who called on him to step down that he would rather die than resign.
Luckily enough, things worked the other way round. As we write this piece, the former Kenyan finance minister is alive and kicking, only that he has succeeded to do the impossible by resigning voluntarily.
It seems as if the culture of resigning from top government positions as a gesture of responsibility is slowly taking root in East Africa.
In Tanzania, some few months ago, then Prime Minister Edward Lowassa and cabinet ministers Nazir Karamagi and Dr Ibrahim Msabaha stepped down after being implicated in a power-generation scandal.
Some observers have termed the developments as healthy, bearing in mind that the culture of accountability has not been the norm in the distant past.
On the other hand, a good portion of observers, for example here in Tanzania, are not yet appeased by the measures, and are calling upon the course of the law to be pursued to the rightful conclusion.
It is argued that those who are suspected of playing the major roles should be cleared or condemned only by the courts.
It is going to be quite interesting to learn in the coming future how the recent major suspects of grand corruption scandals in Kenya and Tanzania are going to be treated, or if their cases shall simply end up being wished away.
In Kenya, the history is rather different because at least, some major culprits in a past case were charged and some property was recovered by the government, and in fact, the on-going scandal that has engulfed Mr Kimunya is a result of those penalties.
The Grand Regency Hotel, which the Kenyan ex-finance minister allegedly sold in contravention of the law, was taken over by the state as a measure of recovering government revenue that had been lost fraudulently.
The lesson that we learn from Kenya is that the war against vice is much more complicated than we might think, and what is needed are sustained measures of holding senior government officers accountable whenever embezzlement of public funds occurs on a large scale.
If the courts shall normally be left out of the good governance process, for the sake of shrieking from the responsibility of letting the law take its course simply because of the assumed political weight of those involved in the milking dry of state coffers, then it means that the law is only for commoners who commit crimes and that there is another category of people who are above the law.
We have to learn from other countries in the world on how they are treating such occurrences, and how they have instilled the fear of the Almighty into all and sundry when it comes to the temptation of tampering with state coffers.
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