Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
1 January 2003
interview
Nairobi — Corruption, and the battle to curb it, was the oft-repeated election campaign message of both Kenya's new president, Mwai Kibaki and his National Rainbow Coalition (Narc), and of the man he beat to the top job, Uhuru Kenyatta, the candidate of the outgoing governing Kenya African National Union (Kanu).
In his inauguration speech on Monday, Kibaki said "Corruption will cease to be a way of life in Kenya" and again pledged to fight the practice, with the help of the people of Kenya, a country where graft has become endemic and some say almost institutionalised.
John Githongo, a political analyst and former journalist, is currently the executive director of Transparency International, Kenya, a watchdog organisation that monitors levels of corruption in and out of government.
In the run up to Kenya's general election on 27 December, Marianne Kihlberg of Swedish Broadcasting and allAfrica.com's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton caught up with Githongo for his predictions on what the outcome would be. He correctly forecast a sweeping victory for Kibaki and Narc in the voting, which has been declared orderly, free and fair by observers.
Githongo also explored the pressing issue of corruption in Kenya, its origins, impact and implications. He again rightly predicted that corruption, and how to fight it, would dominate the initial utterances of the new administration in Kenya.
How would you assess corruption in Kenya?
Corruption in Kenya is systemic, it's endemic. It affects every institution. And at the lowest levels, the simplest corruption is not seen as wrong in the eyes of most Kenyans. They don't see it as being that much of a problem. That is the petty corruption, which takes place at low levels involving small amounts of money.
Grand corruption, which usually involves kickbacks in public works' contracts and that kind of thing, is still very prevalent and is a major problem.
The third type of corruption is particularly prevalent in countries that are undergoing political and economic transition - we call it looting here. It is a type of corruption which is politically driven, in many parts of Africa. It is used to finance militias. It is used to finance elections and competitive politics - that kind of corruption has declined in Kenya. But still Kenya remains in the bottom 10 percent of Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI), always has. That persists which seems to show that, at least in terms of perception, Kenya is one of the world's most corrupt countries.
Give us an example of the three types of corruption you've mentioned.
The petty corruption you will see on the side of the road. If you drive out of here, ask your driver to take you up the Ngong Road, stop there for half an hour and you will see a lot of it, because the police have a roadblock there and they are taking money from every public service vehicle that passes by. That's quite common.
Grand corruption usually involves the government purchasing goods and services at an inflated price, because some of the money is going into the pockets of senior officials - either political or bureaucratic. We have a study called "Public Goods, Private Purposes," which details the way it happens, how grand corruption works.
The third type of corruption, which we saw a bit of in Kenya particularly in the early 1990s and which Mobutu made famous in Zaire, is where the political leadership of a country becomes delinquent with a country's resources and uses them as personal resources, usually for political purposes to keep themselves in power. That destroys all the institutions.
In grand corruption, a service is still delivered. So, if a kickback has been paid to build the road you just drove on, on the way here, the road is still there, it's just that you are paying what you should not be paying for it.
In the looting type of corruption, no goods and no service are delivered. Money is paid, but nothing is delivered for it. This is very premeditated. What it does is really undermine the main institutions of any country. It causes increased money supply, exchange rate falls, banks collapse and it has the effect of undermining the very institutions on which it itself is dependent. So, it's very cannibalistic.
In a country where you have that type of corruption, the main government institutions are deteriorating steadily.
But does Kenya fall into that category?
Kenya fell into that category briefly in the early 1990s, when we first went into multiparty politics. We had a series of scams that is now called 'Goldenburg,' where a lot of people were paid money for export compensation for exporting gold, ostensibly, which they never exported.
That could have set us back, the estimates vary, but about half a billion US dollars. Kenya's entire GDP is US$10bn. That's half a percentage. It's really an extraordinary amount of money. The economic effects of that scam are still being felt to this day in this country.
How?
I'll give you an example. The 'Goldenburg' saga took place really from around 1991 into 1993. In late 1993, the government recognised that things were going wrong, inflation was over 100 percent and there was excess money supply and government had to pull all this money out of the economy. How did they do it? By raising interest rates on government securities, especially treasury bills.
What then happened is that the entire banking sector started buying treasury bills, instead of lending money to Kenyans, because it was much easier. At one point, they were earning 70 percent. So we had a huge amount of money which also came from overseas into Kenya. You bring money in, you earn 70 percent on that and you send it back.
It means a huge percentage, I can't remember the figure, 40 percent of government revenue goes to the paying of interest on debt. That is money that should be going into buying medicines for schools, books for school children and that kind of thing, but it's not doing any of that.
You can tell it if you go into our hospitals and schools, you can tell it. It goes back to 1994, so the impact of that was immediate in a very real sort of way, in practical things. It also affected the psychology of the Kenyan people, in that if a scam of that scale could be perpetrated by people who remained in power, and remained in positions of authority and public trust, it undermines people's faith in their own institutions.
What about the looting type of corruption - has that ended in Kenya?
It has almost gone now, partly because of the work of the media, civil society, NGOs and the international community. The levels of vigilance are very high on this, so the government is not able to get away with it.
How corrupt or how corruptible is the Kenyan?
That's a difficult question. We did a survey on this in 2001, called The Bribery Index, and we found that the people on whom corruption has the biggest impact, or the corruption that captures the imagination of the international community and international press is a scandal like 'Goldenburg,' involving hundreds of millions of US dollars.
But the most insidious and the most destructive type of corruption happening in Kenya is the low-level corruption, petty corruption, because it affects the poor and women most and our study found this. The less educated you are, the more likely you are to suffer it. And at that level, we are beginning to have a debate within our own organisation asking to what extent is it corruption? It is extortion.
The best example - and I always give it in the case of Nairobi, because it happens every day in the city centre in the evening - you have policemen walking about and many people going home and, if you don't have your national identity card, they say 'give us 100 shillings or 200 shillings'. If you don't have the money, then they arrest you.
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