By Eric Wamanji
When coronavirus hit, it appears, a cabal of callous crooks made a kill- literarily and figuratively.
They sourced inferior Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) at inflated costs thus frustrating the struggle against the pandemic. Were a bit of moral sensibility injected in this enterprise, a few souls would still be alive.
But the PPE fiasco is just the latest of a well-trodden path that has seen crooks profiting by thrusting millions of people into clutches of indigence, indignity and death.
Yet, there is an eerie silence, social acceptance even, of every form of fraud in Kenya. Besides, culprits sit pretty, unbothered by the disgrace and anguish they cause.
A moral problem
All this can happen when the conscience is dead. We should be worried.
The conscience is a powerful sovereign internal legislative apparatus of rational beings. This mechanism discerns the right and wrong. It automatically triggers distress upon acts that offend established moral systems. In its absence, the sense of guilt or shame is diminished.
Both guilty and shame are regulatory agents of behavior. So powerful, they produce a sense of inferiority and worthlessness on individuals as a response to socially distasteful behavior. If culprits were jolted by shame or guilt, their malevolent urges would be tamed.
Yet, that’s not the case. Ours is a network of avaricious, vicious, uncouth and predatory characters who will not stop at anything to make a buck including causing deaths.
For you to cause such pain to humanity you must have undergone radical transformation. You must have lost every sense of the human spirit. You must reconstruct other human beings, in your imaginations, to appear like vermin. In essence, you must commit an act of mass dehumanization in your heart and mind.
Cosmological divide
Clearly, these hubristic charlatans have crossed the cosmological divide to the realm of the dark to execute their odious schemes. For, it’s only in the milieu of the dark that conception and discharge of such intolerable vices flourish. Better still, only with primal, beastly instincts, can someone subject humanity to such suffering.
Indeed, once in the realm of dark forces, these folks are deprived of what Immanuel Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, calls the “goodwill”. Yet, the goodwill is the core of all moral imperatives. It sets our species apart.
Even the evolutionist, the legendary Charles Darwin, observed as much in his seminal work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Says he: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.”
That’s why we should be petrified by the profiteering cabals in our midst, most of them extremely influential. Their boundless savagery only means more anguish.
And then, pray, tell, just what happens in those corridors of power such that admission recreates mental frames that are morally asymmetrical? What jabs do people in power get that sterilizes their moral machines?
And this lunacy has accomplices – spouses, children, friends, parents and fans who even consider the disenfranchisement as an entitlement. They are the enemies of the people. God help us. Virtue is thought to be cowardice; vice is courage- success, blessings!
Therefore, even as authorities seeks to prosecute the felons, Kenya, we need to talk. We must confess there’s a pathological moral paralysis especially on those entrusted with our fortunes. We need to reconstruct humane sensibilities and a society that’s anchored on morals, mercy and empathy. Transparency should also be integrated in public dealings to afford scrutiny. It would pay too with a public that is civically conscious. An angry public.