Anti-corruption crusader and Publisher of The Elephant, John
Githongo, writes
in the E-review, “Corruption in Kenya isn’t about greedy procurement officers,
fiddling civil servants, crooked businessmen, shady bankers, thieving
politicians … these players are born of a system of politics and governance
that is itself inherently corrupt; one in which the thieves and those who
facilitate them thrive.” Understanding this is the key to solving the
corruption riddle.
Many times, it has been suggested that graft is a cultural
problem that grew out of a supposed “African” tradition of gift giving. Now, it
is a good practice to be skeptical every time someone uses the word “African”
to imply a uniformity on the continent – and here a healthy dose of skepticism
would be justified.
As Joe Khamisi’s history of corruption - Looters
and Grabbers – demonstrates, corruption was the gift of colonialism.
It was, and still is embedded into the very fabric of the state the British
created. The logic of that state was to legitimize the stealing by the few from
the many and that is evinced throughout its design.
In fact, Kenya was corrupted even before it became Kenya. By
1907, 13 years before the territory officially became a colony, bribery was
already a feature of the nascent state. Khamisi cites Hugh Cholmondeley,
popularly known as Lord Delamere, a leader of the British settlers, describing
the relations between the public and the new rulers: “Time and time, I have had
a native say they were stopped by an Indian policeman. When I asked them how
they got away, they always said, ‘Oh, I gave him something.”
Khamisi also describes how corruption seeped from the white
colonial establishment down to its African enforcers, the appointed chiefs and
policemen. A state built to steal was itself peopled by thieves. As David
Anderson says in Histories
of the Hanged, “Europeans were as guilty of corruption and
malpractice in colonial Nairobi as anyone else, and Africans at the bottom of
the colonial racial hierarchy were most often its victims”. The Rose
Commission, which was established in 1955 to look “into alleged
corruption or other malpractices in relation to the Affairs of the Nairobi City
Council” found that “the practice of City Council servants demanding or
accepting, and of contractors offering, bribes or, if you prefer, money
presents-for services rendered or to be rendered, [was] by no means uncommon”.
Corruption was baked into the state and its templates were
established from early on. At the top, the white elite ripped off the state
through public projects such as the railway and the construction of public
housing, while at the bottom, poorly paid chiefs, members of African courts and
police supplemented their incomes by extorting from the people. As Khamisi puts it, citing David Leonard’s African
Successes: Four Public Managers of Kenyan Rural Development, “Through
corruption and bribery, chiefs were transformed into willing agents of
colonialism and were “implicitly encouraged to use their positions to amass
wealth and demonstrate to all and sundry that it paid to cooperate with
Europeans.”
In this manner, corruption became institutionalized as a way
of doing government business. And when those chiefs and their kids inherited
the state from the British, they really did not know any other way to be.
Following independence in 1963, the civil service was massively expanded. But
the Jomo Kenyatta (Uhuru’s dad) administration was not keen on paying for it.
Following the colonial model, in 1971 the
Ndegwa Commission recommended allowing them to supplement their
wages with private business, which had the effect of legalizing corruption. The
looting ramped up and it has been escalating ever since.
Understanding the systemic roots of corruption would allow Kenyans
to see that successful prosecutions, while a necessary part of a credible
anti-corruption strategy, will not fix the problem. Deterring and punishing the
corrupt is no substitute for fixing a system that not only permits, but also
rewards graft. Convictions, even in the unlikely event meaningful ones were
secured, would be ineffective so long as a third of the government’s budget, some
Sh600 billion according to the EACC, continues to be available to be
stolen every year.
The fact is, the rewards of corruption far outstrip Kenya’s
capacity to punish it. The country’s energies would be better spent in holding
political leaders accountable, not just for delivering convictions and harsher
sentences, but for shutting down the gravy train. And that will require
reforming how the Kenyan state works.
