Tanzania’s President John Magufuli recently sacked two senior officials for opening a fake account to siphon money out of an earthquake fund. Good move? Yes, but there was something disturbingly East African about it.

The earthquake, which shook most of East Africa, killing 16 people in Tanzania and wounding 200, happened on September 10.

So, it took just a few days to open an account to steal money collected for earthquake victims.

In Uganda, a few weeks ago, President Yoweri Museveni was touring areas around Kampala, which has turned into an opposition stronghold and where he and his ruling National Resistance Movement took a drabbing in the chaotic and fraud-marred February poll, dropping bags of money on youth groups to win hearts.

One of the groups he handed a good Ush100 million ($29,500), was a car washers’ savings and co-operative society. It was a “ghost” sacco, not even registered, formed hours before Museveni visited.

These supersonic scams also plagued Kenya’s National Youth Service, which has been in the headlines for months. In a few days, crooks can form dozens of companies, open accounts, conjure up tender documents, snag a big deal, get payment a few days later, and vanish into thin air.

It is a tragedy in that all this ingenuity is in the service of crime. This is how some Kenyan counties end up buying a wheelbarrow for the price of a car.

There are a few solutions. One, an old one, is to introduce greater transparency. It has proved difficult to do, and corruption networks have frustrated it, but that is no reason to give up.

Government tenders are a major area of corruption. Here we can learn from the way churches handle marriages. The announcement of impending weddings are made publicly for several Sundays during Mass, to allow a wife or husband who was discarded illegally, and anyone else who has good reason to rain on the marriage, to do so.

Even on the big day, an opportunity is still given to anyone to sabotage the wedding, when the priest asks anyone who think the couple should not be wed to “speak now or forever hold your peace.” In this digital age, it is easy to do a listing of bidding companies on a website, and ask people to write in their protests.

But that will only go far. Good and crooked people are all attracted to where the biggest pot of money sits. And the biggest pot of money is with the government.

One reason for that is that the private sector in our countries is still primitive and underdeveloped. If there were a lot more money in the private sector, people would focus more attention there.

Unlike governments, however, private businesses have greater incentives to protect their money against crooks.

Continuing economic reforms, and a more aggressive pursuit of private-public partnerships, will shift the pots of money from opaque state coffers.

The crooks will still try to steal it, but the genius it takes to rob, say, a smart tech company like Safaricom or MTN, is also the kind that is so innovative, it can actually lift an economy.

It is why some companies don’t prosecute hackers who break through their fancy security systems. They give them a job instead.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3