Corruption-Economic Growth Nexus: Limitations of the Waterboarding Strategy of Argument

In Enock Twinoburyo I have good company. When I blasted Andrew Mwenda for his arm-chair pseudo economics, some of the reactions were that I could have made the same point in a gentle manner.
On the matter of  civility and intellectual discourse, I resort to the strategy of good old John Maynard Keynes who once said that "words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking". That is the pillar of my blog.
Enock and I are squarely on the same side on the corruption-growth nexus story. I need to add one more thing: the so-called citations (so-called because they are not studies but countries) that Mr Mwenda makes in his wild assertions are cherry-picked.
The strategy that Mr Mwenda employs in his argument is taken from the script of typical policemen in a Banana Republic - pick any in Africa - who pick their victims, torture them until they confess to some preconceived position ( in the US they do waterboarding!).
In this strategy, one picks countries that are likely to fit a preconceived narrative, then go ahead and pick the numbers that will sit well with the narrative, and quickly conclude a "thesis". I call this an attitude in search of justification; and it is not science.
The ethical way of going about it is to gather as much evidence as possible - as Enock tries to do given space limitation in a newspaper Op-Ed - and carefully follow it in whichever direction it takes you.
That is what economist Paul Collier does in The Bottom Billion (if one is not patient to read the book, the New York Times published a good review of the same). Recall that one of the four traps that Collier discusses is one of governance; and in there is the corruption monster!
That is what Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson do in "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" ( if one is not patient to read the book, here  is a very comprehensive review of the same).
I can go on and on, but the bottom line is: bad ideas such as those that Mr Mwenda is peddling in his argument about corruption and growth need to be ruthlessly repudiated.