Kenya Museum Society, Wednesday, 25th October 2000, Louis Leakey Auditorium, National Museum, Nairobi

Kenya Museum Society, Wednesday, 25th October 2000, Louis Leakey Auditorium, National Museum, Nairobi

Kenya Museum Society, Wednesday, 25th October 2000, Louis Leakey Auditorium, National Museum, Nairobi

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Presentation by John Githongo


I WOULD LIKE to thank the Kenya Museum Society for inviting to speak here today. Over the past for months I have been invited to numerous forums to speak on this topic of corruption in my capacity as a representative of the anti-corruption lobby group, Transparency International. Arriving in Canada for our Movement’s annual general meeting three weeks ago the immigration official grilled me rather suspiciously about what my involvement with corruption was. I often feel urge to point out to people that I may be an expert on issues about corruption and not a specialist in corruption. The distinction is fairly significant but one that is obviously lost to the average Canadian immigration officer. A student at the Moi University in Eldoret two weeks ago advised me that the great interest in corruption was because as an issue it is pervasive in Kenya, Kenyans are good at it and yet it is not often spoken about publicly in other than complaining terms. Now there is a greater interest in finding out why it happens and how measures can be implemented to stem it.

For a long time a popular definition of corruption via the equation that C=M+D-A. ‘C’ for Corruption equals ‘M’ for Monopoly, plus ‘D’ for Discretion, minus ‘A’ for Accountability. This definition was popular in a time when corruption was viewed as a predominantly bureaucratic matter that saw excessively powerful decision makers with wide discretionary powers who were operating in an environment without many accountability mechanisms as the main enemies where corruption was concerned. The typical corrupt individual was anyone other than yourself or me and when we were asked to conjure up what a corrupt person looked like we almost invariably came up with someone who looked like a politician, civil servant or a policeman or other such official. This bureaucratic corruption argument had some people who argued that when bribes speeded bureaucratic functions then it was not corruption at all but quote-unquote ‘speed money’ and therefore sometimes actually good for an economy. The speed money argument as a way of, especially businesspeople, cutting through excessive red tape fell on its face when research revealed that often much red tape, slowness and complexity in bureaucratic procedures is actually created specifically and deliberately to provide an opportunity for bribes.

Others argued that a stream-lined well paid civil service was all you needed to get rid of corruption. Research in this area has yielded ambiguous results where corruption is concerned. It is not a definite that the well-paid civil servant will be less corrupt.  This seems especially the case where policemen are concerned. With regard to cops, in some countries where the research has been conducted improved housing and family education seem to have a greater impact on reducing police corruption than higher pay alone.

And so, today the equation Corruption equals Monopoly plus Discretion minus Accountability is seen to lack one vital variable – ‘V’ for Values.

***

CALL IT WHAT you want: corruption, graft, kitu kidogo, chai, commission, hongo, ruhswa roughly it means the same thing.  Corruption is defined most narrowly as the abuse of public office for private gain. However this definition has been expanded by some to include types of corrupt activity that take place in the private sector. At the heart of corruption is an illicit relationship but a relationship nevertheless. Like its more mainstream illicit counterpart the corrupt relationship can in its initial stages be driven by basic needs and or primal urges; considerable intellectual, financial and physical  resources can be expended facilitating it; it may even require investments in personal infrastructure and it is often tentative and fraught with tension; it involves a feeling of excitement and exhilaration for the partners and its most exciting concluding moments happen in secret and in the dark away from prying eyes.

It is not intrinsically useful to make qualitative distinctions between corruption in various parts of the world. At the end of the day it often means the same thing: the abuse of public office for private gain. However, this can be broken up into petty corruption, grand corruption and looting. Petty corruption involves relatively minor amounts of money or gifts changing hands where one of the parties is themselves a relatively minor official in the organisation or system within which the transaction takes place. For example paying a policeman 50 Shillings to ignore the fact that your car’s licence has expired. Grand corruption most often involves businessmen and government officials of senior rank and the figures involved are significant. Examples of these are kick-backs paid to officials on government public works contracts. And by the way in regard to grand corruption, there is now an increasing focus on the supply side of corruption and not surprisingly, therefore, the attention is shifting to include the private sector. Last year Transparency International issued its Bribe Payers Index or BPI that ranked 19 of the world’s leading exporting countries according to perceptions regarding their propensity to use bribes in transacting business internationally. Sweden and Australia emerged as those least likely to pay bribes while South Korea and China scored at the bottom of the list. At the beginning of this year Transparency International released a Bribe Payers Survey that ranked key economic sectors according to which ones were most likely to have public officials who extorted bribes from the business community. Public works and construction came out on top of the list followed by the arms and defence industry; and, in the power sector including petroleum and energy.  Agriculture was at the bottom of the list as the one least likely to have public officials who extorted bribes from the business community.

The third type of corruption I call ‘looting’ and I have recently seen described as large-scale economic delinquency. It differs slightly from petty and grand corruption, however, and is sadly prevalent in those Third World countries where institutions of governance are weak. Looting usually involves the kind of scams whose figures are so huge that when they are successfully concluded they have macroeconomic implications fairly quickly – they cause banks to collapse, inflation to rise, the exchange rate to decline. The impetus for looting is often political and it happens under the direction or with the acquiescence of the dominant political players in a given country. It often involves, for example, the printing of currency to fund fictitious projects; using public revenues to award enormous contracts to individuals who never supply the goods or the services – in Uganda they call this ‘air supply’ because you get paid but only have to supply air. The primary movers in the companies behind these scams don’t just cream off 10 or 20 percent with a cut within that for the higher-ups. In these deals the cut can be as high as 100 percent and most of the cash goes to the higher-ups. These resources fund election campaigns and pay for private militias in many African countries.

Another important distinction between grand corruption and looting, in my opinion, is this: in cases of grand corruption a minister may take a kickback of 100,000 dollars on a government road construction contract worth a million dollars. The road is built but its quality does not reflect its cost. Looting on the other hand is a much more premeditated activity because it often entails the deliberate creation of a government project for which resources will be allocated and spent but the project is not meant to be completed from the outset. If grand corruption is manslaughter, then looting is murder. Looting, as far as I can tell is most prevalent in a number of Third World countries and I have also heard of it in relation to certain countries in the former Communist bloc. Typically, in a country where grand corruption and looting happen regularly corruption has become systemic and pervades a society. There are some who argue that Kenya is such a country because graft seems to permeate the entire fabric of our society from the very top to the very bottom.

Until quite recently there was a certain fondness among some analysts for the argument that corruption is somehow part and parcel of the African make-up; that there is a cultural explanation to corruption in Africa that demonstrates why it is so systemic and pervasive today. Arguments are made to this day about how whenever someone visited the Chief or the Big Man in the village one took along a chicken or some other produce as a quasi-gift and guarantee of quality services. Even some senior African politicians and academics persist in using this essentially racist argument today. Generally speaking when I hear a senior public official be he or she be a civil servant or politician make this argument, then I’m reasonably confident to be standing before someone who has engaged in graft, is engaging in it or plans and dreams of engaging in it one day. The cultural argument does not explain the corruption they call cronyism in Asia and the large scale rather ferocious corruption we have seen in countries like Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But let me go back to the environment that facilitates corruption becoming systemic as some would argue it has become in Kenya.

Many African countries like Kenya are characterised by weak and vulnerable national governance institutions, such as parliament, the judiciary, civil service and police. They are also characterised by a limited democratic culture; and, human, natural, technological resources that are not as developed as they are in the West from where the governance institutions were borrowed in the first place. Also, ours is an environment where there is often limited awareness on the part of wider population with regard to their fundamental rights and this makes for the most fertile ground for corruption generally. As a result, corruption is also a human rights and political issue as well. 

The reality in many Third World countries like Kenya with small economies is that the local financial elite – those with serious resources in relative terms - is comprised of two players: foreign capital, comprising mainly multinationals and other firms representing overseas interests; and, secondly, a local elite of businessmen, traders and landholders who acquire wealth either through traditional inheritance or via some connection with the State. This vital connection can take many forms. In many African countries which, unlike many of their Asian counterparts, did not have established trader classes by the time of foreign colonialisation, those who came to be described as ‘the rich’ after independence started off as civil servants, politicians, military men or other players whose main characteristic was that they were close to the centre of power. Some would argue that the nature of present day corruption in the Third World, therefore, varies depending on the relative size of the state sector in the economy at the time of independence from colonial rule.

In many African countries, the State and foreign capital were the key players in the organised tax-paying sectors economy at the time of independence. The African elites of today have developed into such through connections to the State or via participation in the State itself through politics, the civil service or military. They are the ones who win most government contracts, are able to obtain loans from state-owned financial institutions most easily; are able to apply successfully for government allocations of public land and are able to lobby most effectively for government tax concessions, changes in investment regulations and the like. Corruption, the serious corruption that undermines development in the most sudden and debilitating ways, is an elite activity.

After independence, foreign capital in most African countries quickly allied itself to the State and its associated elites, for example by appointing people with connections to their boards of directors. In a country like Kenya the ‘joint venture’ was very much in vogue and often brought together the local bureaucratic and political elite with foreign capital. For the interests of this argument I join together Kenya Asian capital with foreign capital simply because the government of the day very often treated Kenyan Asian capital as if it was somehow less Kenyan than the rest. Anyway, what this mushrooming of relationships after independence did was create an overall incestuous relationship between business, politics and the bureaucracy. For politicians, bureaucrats and the elite generally, these relationships became the primary mode of wealth accumulation. Corruption, it should be noted is one of the aspects that significantly diminishes the civil service in relation to the political class creating in effect a political bureaucracy that almost functions as a secretariat for the ruling party in a given country.

In this type of environment the very character of vital national institutions such as the civil service, judiciary, legislature, police and others is transformed. Even though one cannot sometimes tell from the outside, an alternative or parallel power structure develops that has tentacles in all economic, political and social sectors. This structure has one primary purpose, to maintain the ruling elite’s hold on state power and, therefore, the primary mode of economic accumulation. When under threat, for example when faced with democratic agitation, authoritarian regimes can sometimes resort to corruption on a scale that can only be described as looting to finance its hold on power.

Interestingly, foreign investors in African countries quickly recognise the weakness of formal governance institutions and seek to establish relationships with key players in the informal power structure to secure their investments. For the serious European investor in countries we know where corruption is endemic, therefore, the quality of the local investment code is of infinitely less importance than establishing mutually beneficial relationships with the head of state, his relatives and cronies generally. In the case of most African countries historically, the effectiveness of informal power networks in allocating resources to its members has been profound.

The donor community too has a complicated relationship with this kind of elite.  A colleague within TI who is based in Tanzania and has written on aid and corruption notes in the case of Tanzania:
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“Any corrupt use of government revenues implicates aid, since at least half of the recurrent and almost the entire development budget are aid-financed. Aid money is channelled through the recurrent and development budgets that is earmarked for specific activities may end up being used instead for corrupt activities. The corruption in these cases may be at the national level or at the regional and district levels… This ‘system’ developed during the days of unaccountable one party rule…. [and] to date, the system continues to run a high return, low risk operation.”

When elites that are part of informal structures of power perpetrate much of the most harmful corruption, it exacerbates already serious levels of poverty and economic inequality. This is partly because in the economies where such elites flourish the governance institutions are weak and members of the elite and their associates are almost literally beyond the law. As a result the well-connected people don’t have to pay the same taxes like everyone else; policemen and other junior officials seeking small bribes don’t dare solicit cash from them. At the end of the day it is the poor and the weak who face the true brunt of corruption.
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The economic liberalisation programmes that have been implemented by many African governments over the past decade and a half were partly put in place with the premise that the weakening of central controls on economic affairs would reduce discretionary decision-making by the government in economic affairs and thus corruption and inefficiency. There are indications, however, that the liberalisation of banking systems and foreign exchange regimes, the privatisation of parastatals and streamlining of fiscal controls in contexts with parallel power structures and weak governance institutions has itself led to new and sometimes deadly forms of corruption and economic crime generally. This might account for many stalled privatisation processes in parts of the Third World and is a lesson that economic reform without corresponding real political reforms creates serious problems. This process of gradual criminalisation was recently described by three notable experts on African politics thusly:

“The criminalisation of politics and of the state may be regarded as routinisation, at the very heart of political and governmental institutions and circuits, of practices whose criminal nature is patent, whether as defined by the law of the country in question, or as defined by the norms of international law and international organisations or as so viewed by the international community, and most particularly that constituted by aid donors… In Madagascar, Congo and the Central African Republic, presidents newly elected by universal suffrage have sought ‘parallel financing’ from organisations which are clearly fronts for money-laundering or fraud on a grand scale…” 
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An environment where corruption is rampant and corrupt activities are seen as an important method of accumulation is often characterised by dysfunctional attitudes towards what constitutes corruption. And this where perhaps we can explore the question that is today’s topic: Corruption – Are We Innocent? In a high impunity environment with regard to graft one can often see the corrupt lauded as latter day Robin Hood-style heroes. How often do you read of some of the largest contributors to the construction of churches in certain parts of the country being among individuals often mentioned in the press in relation to cases of major corruption. An anecdotal indicator of this kind of situation and its effect on national morale is, for example, a falling regard for the profession of teaching among the youth. In Kenya and much of Africa there was a time when if you went to a rural village the local school teacher, headman, chief, pastor and other such individuals were among the most highly regarded community leaders. Today because it is the corrupt who seem to succeed most in terms of acquiring material wealth, the product a teacher sells – education – simply does not seem to have as a high a value as it once did. Short-cuts to wealth seem more effective. Many youths opt to wait for that single big deal that can bring sudden wealth by virtue of what are euphemistically described as ‘connections’. But in truth we are all forced to seek ‘connections’ of one form or the other, to make sure our telephone does not die once a day; that your passport is processed in seven days instead of seven months. What we pray at the back of our minds is that we don’t have to pay for these connections – that services can be rendered with a smile because people want to do a good job and gain satisfaction from the satisfied customer.


***
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IN A HIGH impunity environment such as ours people sometimes ask me whether it is useful for Transparency International to concentrate so much on public awareness through tools like the Corruption Perceptions Index as it does from its headquarters in Berlin and from its National Chapters in 77 countries. After all, people argue, Kenyans know that graft is bad and that it is a major national problem. However, in the context of countries like Kenya and many other Third World countries where the rule of law is weak, public awareness by TI needs to take place at two levels. At the most generic level, awareness that corruption is bad and that it undermines economic development and subverts vital institutions in a society. This level of awareness, in my opinion as someone who has worked with TI for some years is generally widespread in Kenya.

For us in Kenya specifically, therefore, the more fundamental awareness that we need to happen is this: that corruption is also a bad thing when my fellow Gikuyu is involved; it is as bad when a Gikuyu does it as it is when a Kalenjin or a Muhindi or a Mzungu does it; indeed, it is just as bad when I do it as when my brother, cousin or whomever does it. Here I’m talking about an awareness that the fellow who steals from a parastatal and donates generously to build the local church is a crook not a ‘guest of honour’; the Kenyan who grabs land from the local primary school and builds a big hotel on it is more of a crook than a ‘private developer’; the chap who takes with impunity from a public body and builds an entire housing estate is more of a crook than a ‘tycoon’, or ‘billionaire businessman’ - even if he changes his or her religious affiliation.
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The weakness in the rule of law contributes significantly to shaping these attitudes. As a result of it, for example, when my fellow tribesman is charged with graft it is more likely for me to view it as some sort of sophisticated ethnic pogrom. It is more likely because we live in a place where as a result of the denigration of the rule of law ethnic pogroms can indeed happen and have happened in various ways; actions against which the majority have no legal recourse. A weakness in the rule of law exemplified by an unreliable judicial system which is easily manipulated politically turns us all into sinners where corruption is concerned. This is because a lot of the corruption that takes place is actually extortion. Zero tolerance and just-say-no policies are best but while we advocate them we must think, for example, of the young woman who is rushing home from work in the evening and bumps into policemen who threaten to throw her into cells because she is not carrying her identity card unless she gives them 100 Shillings.

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THE OTHER DAY a foreign journalist asked me: if there is no power, no water, no sugar, a collapsing economy, Father Kaiser has been murdered, you have had rigged elections, ethnic cleansing, Goldenberg, collapsing infrastructure, you are about to sack over 40,000 civil servants – so when is the revolution coming? What’s up with you Kenyans? In West Africa when governments attempt to raise the price of fuel or Value Added Tax you have demonstrations and blood flows in the streets; are we talking about 28 million suckers here? I told my friend no, the fact of the matter is that one of the strengths of Kenyans is their resilience; the fact that our population is generally conservative and respectful of authority. As a result, and quite thankfully, some of the woollier revolutionary ideas that sell in other countries don’t sell here. We are too wrapped up in trying to put food on the table, trying to pay school fees, hospital bills, mortgages, and for plots of land and assorted mitumba items. It would seem there are too many property owners and aspiring property owners in Kenya for a revolution at the current time. This is a strength that can be built on while acknowledging that poverty, especially among the youth, means many of them have less and less of a stake in today’s Kenya.

I don’t think the battle against corruption in Kenya is a hopeless one. Rhetorically at least even our top leadership acknowledges that it is a national problem. This is a useful start. The challenge is in fighting it collectively as Kenyans in an environment that is not poisoned by mistrust and suspicion especially as regards perceived ambitions and interests. Reducing graft takes time even in more developed countries. The central challenge for us is to return collective hope in Kenya, to improve our hope index so that a majority of citizens become convinced that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, this year better than the last and this millennium an improvement on the rather challenging last one. The fight against corruption can only really succeed in this kind of enabling environment. Political uncertainty is the main enemy of hope about the future for all of us.



    Thank-you very much…


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