e-Citizen scam: How Kenya perfected the art of losing billions

If there was a Nobel Prize for fighting corruption, Auditor General Nancy Gathungu should have it proudly on her shelf. She has become a one-woman anti-graft army, tirelessly exposing the ills of this country with the relentlessness of someone who actually believes accountability is possible.

Unfortunately, that makes her a rare and lonely figure. Instead of being celebrated, she is insulted, harassed, and belittled by politicians whose only consistent talent is avoiding responsibility. Many treat her as a mere irritant—“all bark and no bite.” But the bite isn’t hers to deliver. Her job is to document and expose, put the rot on paper for all to see. Whether the culprits are brought to justice is the job of others—though in Kenya, that’s a job perpetually deferred.

Her records are a damning archive of theft and mismanagement. One day—perhaps in some far-off political future—we might get a government with the courage (or desperation) to dedicate its entire term to one task: jailing thieves.

In fact, if I were a minister in the current administration, I would dedicate myself to making our prisons more comfortable, because sooner or later, there’s a high probability I might be living there myself.

Let’s narrow our focus to just one scandal: the infamous e-Citizen case, where Sh9.4 billion reportedly went missing. The government insists no money was lost.

Officials made their rounds on TV and at press conferences, defending the indefensible with straight faces of seasoned performers. But I didn’t believe a word.

And if you’ve lived in Kenya long enough, neither did you.

The numbers don’t add up. Kenyans have learned that when an official says, “No money was lost,” it often means, “We can’t trace it, but someone is enjoying it.”

Former President Uhuru Kenyatta once admitted—perhaps accidentally—that Kenya loses Sh2 billion every day to corruption. He said it as if reporting the weather, and I fault him for that. He did nothing meaningful to stop it, and this amount, if anything, has likely doubled or tripled under the current administration.

Let’s do the math. Sh2 billion a day means Sh730 billion a year. Over a five-year term, that’s Sh3.65 trillion—enough to transform Kenya into something close to Singapore. We could have world-class infrastructure, universal healthcare, quality education, and an economy that actually works for its people. Instead, we have street thuggery, hospitals with no doctors or medicine, teachers striking for unpaid salaries, while politicians throw lavish parties, sipping champagne while the rest languish in poverty.

And yet, even smaller sums—at least “small” by Kenya’s corruption standards—could do wonders for the citizenry. Take the billions being channeled into building grand cathedrals at the State House for instance.

Imagine redirecting that to school feeding programmes, affordable housing, clean water projects, or rural clinics. Imagine repairing every broken borehole in arid counties so that women no longer walk 10km for water. Imagine stocking every public hospital with adequate medicine so that no patient has to buy painkillers from a private chemist.

The saddest part is how normalised it has all become. Graft is no longer shocking; it’s just another headline.

A big scandal breaks, hashtags trend for 48 hours, the accused appear in court looking bored, and then everything quietly dies down until the next scandal. The national memory resets, but the looting never stops.

For now, the Auditor General will keep producing her reports, politicians will keep pretending nothing happened, and Kenyans will continue paying the price in bad roads, empty hospitals, and schools without books.

Still, the paper trail is there. And one day—perhaps in that long-awaited political utopia—someone will dust off those reports, follow the evidence, and fill the prisons. Until then, we remain a nation where Sh9.4 billion can disappear from a single portal and the official explanation is, “No money was lost.”

-The writer is a communications consultant