I recently attended an ODM-UDA “family” meeting. In March, the two parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on ten key governance, social and economic issues affecting Kenyans.

If implemented as planned, the MoU between the two largest political parties could transform Kenya for good. That’s because it calls for inclusive growth and opportunity among all Kenya’s demographics, the deepening and broadening of the country’s democratic experiment, including on development, the youth, and other sectors of society.

The 10-point agenda called for the compensation of victims of riots and protests. The document reads like a blueprint for Kenya’s renaissance. But one thing stood out – finger-pointing about corruption. This is my take – corruption is an existential threat to Kenya. We must fight it without making it a political football.

I have said it before, and do so here again. No country in the history of the world has ever become great without a visionary elite; an elite that imagines the greatness of country beyond self-aggrandizement. One of the worst sins that any elite can commit against country is to have its hands in the cookie jar all too often. It’s true no society has ever totally eliminated corruption.

Nor is that even a human possibility. Thieves of the public purse will always be among us, as those who are also morally decrepit. Call it human nature or the temptations of our worst proclivities. You can also blame it on social inequities. But already rich people who steal from the public to get richer are traitors.

There’s a difference between thieving and looting. In my books, thieves are aplenty in many societies. The chicken thief. The visitor who pockets a teaspoon. The thief of the petty variety. Then there’s looting; he who amasses wealth from the public treasury. A looter has no conscience. None. These are the folks who’ve stripped Latin America and Africa to the bone. They eat everything.

They secret money abroad. They waste money. They invest not at home but abroad buying palatial homes they never live in. Buying banks, yachts, and useless castles. Mobutu Sese Seko and many political elites in then Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) fit this description. They are traitors to the Motherland. This typology of an African hates Africa with an evil zeal.

I am glad to report that Kenya isn’t Zaire – yet. Our democracy and public morality are still working, even if their heart is beating only faintly. But a man is a fool if he smiles when told that smoking cigarettes is dangerous to his health. That’s because smoking – unless it’s my occasional classic cigar – kills. We have nothing to be proud of about the corruption culture in Kenya. It’s eating our society to death.

Our children learn to steal before they’ve lost all their baby teeth. For such a child, corruption becomes not the software in the brain, but its hardware.

He’s irredeemable and bound for damnation. Can a congenital thief produce a child who isn’t a thief? May be, but the odds are infinitesimal.

The problem of Kenya’s elite is that if we find and establish that one is a looter of public resources, that person has no shortage of defenders. People from his community, also known pejoratively as a tribe, will immediately jump to his defence, even when they don’t know the person, and the person could care less who the defenders are. Soon, cries of “our man is being finished” rent the air.

By the way, rarely is the culprit being defended a woman. It’s usually that pot-bellied man who disdains his neighbours and abhors their company. My point is simple. Such tactics defeat the fight against corruption and are part of the reason why South Korea is where it is, and we are not.

I don’t like selective justice for that’s not justice at all. It’s selective persecution. But if an official is caught red-handed with their hand in the cookie jar, what should the prosecutor do?

Shout that he can’t prosecute because he will be accused of selective prosecution? No. He must prosecute. It’s better for one thief to be prosecuted than for all thieves to go scot-free. Why would any country want more looters running freely in the neighbourhood? I say lock him up and throw away the key.

A looter is a murderer of the spirit of the community and a thief of the dreams of our children. He who steals the dreams of children leaves them orphaned by their own country.

I end where I started. No arm of government among the three is free of corruption. There are plenty of accusations against each arm to fill the Indian Ocean. Jubilee’s Uhuru Kenyatta once told the nation Kenya lost at least Sh2 billion a day. He never said what he was doing to secure the bag from the thieves. Now the Legislature is in the crosshairs and so is the Judiciary. We need heads to roll.

Prof Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. He’s Senior Advisor on Constitutional Affairs to President William Ruto. @makaumutua.