Prison break season 3 is a blockbuster of sorts.

The bad guys have been on the run in the previous season after a successful escape from Fox River penetentiary.

A few have not made it this far but the stars of the moment are now contained in this hellish prison in Panama.

‘Penitenciaria Federal de Sona‘ is it’s name.

And as a local lawyer describes it, ‘…what goes in never comes out…unless it’s dead!’

This is not your ordinary prison where your average inmates enjoy at least a meal a day (even if they have to hustle for it).

Instead, it’s every man for himself.

But no one enjoys the ride there like the ‘big kahunas’…

A brand of esteemed inmates entrusted with power by the wardens who only venture in to ‘discipline’ the errant.

These ‘esteemed’ inmates enjoy all the niceties life has to offer inside the prison but at the expense of the masses.

And whoever dares to challenge them is almost always guaranteed to die.

In this prison, henchmen have a field day.

This is not to mention drug dealers, male prostitutes, peddlers of all things contraband to name but a few.

In short, the life of a person desiring to do good is short lived because good isn’t good enough.

Instead, bad is best.

Murder and maiming isn’t frowned upon because it’s ‘part of the package’.

Molestation and thuggery are part of the life within these walls.

They thrive because the baddest don’t get questioned for their bad acts.

They are the kings of impunity.

What’s impunity?

You might ask…

It’s the culture of deliberately doing wrong because no punishment is forthcoming.

As farfetched as this story may sound, our nation, Kenya seems to be descending down this same slippery slope.

We have politicians who have a track record of thuggery and corruption instructing us to trust them with the economy.

We have police officers, pressed down by poor working conditions training their guns and clubs on the innocent…yet they still expect us to trust them with our security.

We have deranged criminals who wantonly kidnap, maim and kill our children yet still expect us to believe that they are good people who acted out of ‘external influences’ best known to them.

We have spouses, men and women who pounce on their fellow spouses and lovers with viciousness. They commit crimes of passion leaving behind a trail of blood and tears.

We have gangs which pounce on innocent people going about their business. They wield machetes, clubs and spears and spare nothing to make their point even if it’s based on a pretext.

They kill and maim knowing all too well that they’ll answer to no one.

Such a state of affairs would lead most of us towards hopelessness.

And true to this fact, Kenya is now one of the most depressed nation in Africa.

To cement this fact, by July 2021, over 400 people had been reported as having committed suicide.

This compares very negatively against less than 200 who had been reported in the year 2020.

In short, we are living in a ‘Penitenciaria Federal de Sona‘.

Leadership is lacking because those entrusted with it have delegated their responsibility to criminals or are themselves part of the criminal entreprise that thrives in impunity.

Impunity injects hopelessness.

It breeds a don’t care culture.

One that even drives the most vulnerable among us to ignore safety protocols such as those of COVID-19.

By doing this, we think we’re hurting the powers-that-be but instead, we are punishing ourselves.

For a society to function as a society, accountability structures must work.

But they can’t work if we won’t agree to be put to task.

They won’t work if we consider ourselves untouchables who violate all the rules of the game.

For Kenya to live up to it’s potential, impunity must fall.

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