The year is 2050, 40 years since the promulgation of Kenya’s constitutional order back in 2010. Corruption has long since gained a vice-like grip on the nation. Parliament stands semi-permanently dissolved, county services, suspended for want of resources. Democracy and devolution, lay lifeless, rendered casualties of private enrichment and gain. A Judiciary administers justice blindly, referring not to its impartiality, but to its deficit of moral vision. Kenya’s civil society has fallen silent, starved of foreign funding and persons of bona fide ethical conviction. Once a potent social protagonist, Kenya’s private sector is in retreat, when not firmly beholden to the interests of the nation’s Executive. Kenya’s religious institutions, Academy and media fraternity have resigned from a steady common quest for the truth. On the global stage, our athletes stand humiliated, disqualified from contending, else presumed to be guilty of cheating unless proven otherwise. Likewise, among the community of nations, our Kenyan economy, once a global frontier has fallen behind other nations, our citizens and residents un-swept by rising tides of global prosperity and opportunity. Mortally, a threat of a Covid-50 global pandemic looms inevitably, but corruption in Kenya has left no enduring infrastructure, no credible evidence on how to effectively address it domestically.

A developing nation only but in principle, we have become in 2050 like a body overcome by metastatic cancer, corruption infecting all parts of our national corpus. Its effects over the years have been all too palpable: the distortion of public investments; impairment of public service delivery; exacerbation of market uncertainty; retardation of economic growth; amplification of living costs; the entrenchment of poverty and income inequality; the elevation of unemployment rates; the suppression of human potential; the curtailment of innovation; the expropriation of fundamental freedoms and deprivation of human rights; the straining of social contracts; the erosion of public trust; fomenting citizen anarchism and emboldening foreign incursions, jeopardising our nation’s security and sovereignty. We have grown accustomed over time to this new state of nature deeply woven into the fabric of our collective social psychology – defined by economic opportunism over principle, legal and moral ambiguity over certitude and social anomie over collective efficacy. Our fatal flaw was assuming in 2020, that corruption in Kenya couldn’t possibly get much worse than it was then or persist unabated – that corruption could not rob Kenya’s purpose and promise.

As Strathmore University, we posit that left on an unchanging course, the portrait of Kenya in 2050 stands to be the norm rather than the anomaly. We postulate that that as the nation of Kenya, we can create a Kairos moment – a defining moment in the moral history of our nation – when we must collectively choose whether to act now to preclude our descending into corruption’s fatal grip while the cancer of corruption is yet pubescent, or acquiesce to a portrait of Kenya in 2050 as described above. Sensing an opportunity to lead alongside others on this moral charge, we seek to elevate the place of the Academy and our stakeholders in fighting corruption in Kenya.

Right from Strathmore’s founding as Kenya’s first racially-desegregated learning institution in Kenya, Strathmore has been a key protagonist in advancing social good in Kenya. Similarly, we were early to recognize the promise of technology for delivering social change in 21^st century Kenya and introduced new programmes to leverage linkages between business opportunities and technology transformation. As a protagonist of social change, we presented Kenya’s first stand-alone business school, numerous life-changing start-ups and a globally-recognised, socially-engaged law school bent on changing the lived experiences of many Kenyans today.

Drawing on Strathmore’s rich history of service to our community, its institutional missional orientation and adeptness in ethical formation, we seek on 20^th November to convene a forum bringing together proven ethical agents and system changers – a global and continental contingent of practitioners, partners, pedagogues and public citizens, to join us in constructing and reimagining solutions to effectively tame corruption in Kenyan society and the world at large.

The 2020 Strathmore Ethics Conference testifies to our abiding belief that success in taming the leviathan of corruption in Kenya is unlikely to be achieved without the efforts of learning institutions such as Strathmore University, who as a collective exist to repel the enemies of individual and collective ignorance, social maladaptation, moral depravity and the absence of common narratives. On the same account, institutions such as Strathmore University, are equipped to advance new insights, incubate creativity, spark collaboration and shape the intellectual and moral formation of our community leaders, thereby being integral to efforts to provoke large-scale societal change in ethical conduct in Kenya.

In accordance with the theme of this Conference which is: Promoting Ethical Behaviour: Do Good, Be More, Fight Corruption, the conference aims to achieve the following key practical objectives:

1. To identify and recognise ethical agents for contributions made to promoting ethics and fighting corruption;
2. To promote lesson-based dialogues between proven ethical agents and system changers – practitioners, partners, pedagogues and public citizens;
3. To evaluate the state of ethics and corruption in Kenya in light of previously proposed interventions;
4. To underscore the Academy’s contribution to promoting ethic and fighting corruption;
5. To vividly forecast the state of ethics and corruption in Kenya in 2050;
6. To construct and reimagine solutions to effectively tame corruption in Kenya and the world at large; and
7. To co-create and propose an Applied Ethics Curriculum for all Citizens.

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