With their rather silly-looking green robes, seated solemnly in wood-panelled courtrooms adjudicating virtually wordlessly over weighty matters of the law, Supreme Court judges in Kenya look like the closest thing you can come to an earthly description of saints.

The fall of one of them over a crude corruption scandal – for make no mistake he will fall and his friends (not the “learned” variety who are likely to benefit from a lengthy legal drama) should advise him to take his pension payment and run rather than face the embarrassment of a tribunal – is truly shocking.

News of corruption among officials in the public and private sector in Kenya has become routine and lost its shock value.

So some government official pocketed a kickback to award a tender? Well, don’t they all?

So a policeman shook you down for a bribe? Have you met one who didn’t? (In fact, corruption among the police is so routine, it is regarded as entirely normal. A friend told me in jest that he was arrested for a traffic offence while quite broke in January and thought of asking the cop: Do you accept credit cards?)

It is the stuff of legend that all officials in the immigration and Kenya Revenue Authority in certain departments own a block of flats somewhere in Nairobi, despite their relatively modest civil servant pay.

But our top judges were supposed to be different. Being a judge at the highest level is idealised as an effort to contribute intellectually to the development of the nation and to advance the quest for justice, especially for those who need it most.

END INSTITUTIONALISED RACISM

Few did more to end institutionalised racism in the United States than the judges of the Supreme Court there.

If in the Kenyan version a judge can enter into discussions with “intermediaries”, whether money changed hands or not, that spells trouble.

Of course, so far these remain mere allegations but the fact that they stood up to scrutiny in the eyes of the panel that recommended the formation of a tribunal is a damning indictment of the highest court in the land.

Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, a man of immense dignity and integrity (it is a tribute to his character that few think he touched any of the coins of silver that may or may not have changed hands in this case) has a job on his hands to at least repair the image of the institution he leads before he hands over to his predecessor.

One can scarcely think of a greater investment in trust by a society than appointment to the high office of a Supreme Court judge, a group of individuals who have the final say on all matters of law in the country.

It is true that human nature inclines towards self-reward as Chinua Achebe’s young narrator Odili Samalu, in A Man of the People, discovers when he found Chief Nanga, a respected chief and interpreter of the society’s traditions and rules, was using the new colonial tax system not to build hospitals and schools but to erect four-storey buildings for himself (like our KRA and immigration chaps).

Achebe wrote that in the transition from a traditional system like ours to a new, “alien” one imposed by the colonialists, people who previously could not amass and grab wantonly due to the old rules that governed society will take the opportunity to “eat”.

DRIED HIS BODY

“A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors the whole time. The trouble with our new nation as I saw it then lying on that bed was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say, to hell with it. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday.”

Achebe later explained in an interview that Nigerians were not any different from any other people in the world except that there were no sanctions for corruption in his country.

If these were imposed across the board, he argued, things would rapidly change. This would surely apply for Kenya, too.

But if the findings of a recent survey of attitudes among the youth by the East African Institute of the Aga Khan University are anything to go by, there is plenty of work to be done.

About half of the respondents said they see nothing wrong with corruption and four in 10 said they would only vote for someone who paid them.

The latest scandal hasn’t exactly helped these youths to change their minds.