POLITICS-KENYA: Slow Progress in War on Graft

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Oct 30 2004 (IPS) - Concerned about the slow progress in the war on corruption in Kenya, the United Nations has urged the government of Mwai Kibaki to double its efforts to contain the vice.

‘’After holding a series of meetings with top government officials and independent corruption watchdogs such as Transparency International, it is clear that the government should maintain the momentum which it had employed to address corruption in the beginning when it came to power,’’ the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on corruption, Christy Mbonu, told journalists Oct. 28.

She was speaking in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, following her Oct. 25-28 meeting with Kenyan officials. They held discussions about measures to contain corruption.

The UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights is the principal subsidiary organ of the UN Commission on Human Rights. It has been charged with the responsibility of analysing countries’ status of human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights.

It has also been charged with the task of preparing comprehensive country studies on corruption with particular focus on economic rights. The mandate of the Rapporteur was endorsed by the Sub-Commission early this year.

Kenya is the first country to be visited by Mbonu, owing to its radical measures instituted last year to contain corruption. ‘’What endeared me to Kenya was the Ringera report on judicial reforms. The surgical operation on the judiciary that followed has never been done in any country,’’ she remarked.

The report, released by Justice Aaron Ringera in October last year, implicated, among others, judges for taking bribes and seeking sexual favours to make rulings. Twenty-three judges, some of them commanding high-social standing, were suspended from the bench, and a tribunal set to try them.

One of the judges, Philip Waki, the first to be cleared of graft early October, has since returned to work, one year after being out in the cold.

The government of President Kibaki, which came to power Dec. 31, 2002 on an anti-corruption platform, established another commission to investigate a scam in which about 600 million dollars were lost in a dubious export of diamonds and gold from Kenya in early 1990s. The company concerned was Goldenberg International.

The Goldenberg Commission, established in Mar. 2003, is still conducting investigations into the graft, popularly referred to as the Goldenberg scandal.

Mbonu said results of the Goldenberg Commission of Inquiry had to be seen for the government’s war on corruption to be taken seriously. ‘’Some of the people implicated are behind bars. If there are other people, regardless of their richness, they should also be put behind bars,’’ she said.

Those implicated include business tycoon Kamlesh Pattni, former president Daniel arap Moi, current serving education minister George Saitioti who was Moi’s vice president, and energy minister Simeon Nyachae.

To wage an effective campaign against corruption, Mbonu said too many mechanisms will prove counter productive. ‘’The proliferation of mechanisms is a creation of the donor community. It is donors who say that ‘there is corruption in one institution, create this body to check it. Again corruption is present in another organ; build this other body to fight it.’ This may be dangerous,’’ she warned.

Her remarks came in the wake of concerns by members of Parliament Oct. 27 that too many commissions were causing confusion in the war on corruption. According to the legislators, the more than 10 bodies formed to fight graft by the Kibaki government were duplicating each other’s roles, and that since their establishment, no tangible reduction in corruption had been recorded.

Kenya was ranked 131 out of 146 in this year’s Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index, above Nigeria, which stood at position 144, making it the most corrupt in Africa. However, Kenya still falls in the list of top ten African countries with a high level of graft among public servants in the yearly TI poll that ranks countries based on the prevalence of corruption in the public sectors. The Index was launched in London Oct. 20.

Defending itself, the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, whose director is Justice Ringera, says progress has been made in the fight against corruption. On Oct. 20, Ringera announced that his commission had concluded 38 corruption cases, ready for prosecution. They include high-profile cases involving top figures, some in government. According to Ringera, the commission was working on 209 other cases.

For the war on corruption to succeed, the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has called on government to protect whistle blowers. The UN wants whistle blowers protected in all aspects including assurance of their jobs.

But David Munyakei and Constable Naftali Lagat, who blew the whistle in the Goldenberg scandal, were subjected to police harassments. The two won the Transparency International Integrity Awards Oct. 8.

Munyakei, a former clerk at the Central Bank of Kenya, was sacked for unearthing the loss of about 300 million dollars from the bank, which had been paid in an illegal transaction involving the bank and Goldenberg International. He has remained jobless since then.

Lagat’s crime was stopping Pattni at the airport for allegedly trying to import illegal gold. He detained several of Pattni’s suitcases, and refused to hand them over to him. Lagat was arrested, questioned at the Criminal Investigations Department headquarters in Nairobi and transferred to a remote police station in the Rift Valley province.

The TI awards are given every year to citizens who show courage in exposing corruption.