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There is an oft-circulated photograph of a January 1968 copy of the Daily Nation with the banner headline: GOVT. PLEDGE TO CRUSH CORRUPTION. Above the headline, there is a strap that carries the legend: Vice-President Moi asks Kenyans to hand in information.
That news story reported breathlessly: “Kenya’s vice-president Mr Daniel arap Moi promised in parliament yesterday that the government would take action to stamp out corruption.”
In 1968, the country was still naive enough to believe, firstly, that the government was serious, and secondly, that this feat could be achieved.
Kenya has been “fighting corruption” on paper since independence, but tangible results have been scant.
That January 1968 newspaper front page is regularly circulated to highlight that almost since independence in 1963, the government has been claiming to fight corruption and yet, as they say, here we are.
We are at the point where no less a figure than National Treasury and Economic Planning Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi appears to have admitted that the state has lost the battle against corruption and capital flight. Now he wants to see if they can mitigate graft.
The Cabinet Secretary is quoted in the Standard saying, “If we cannot fight corruption and rout it out, we better allow people who have illicit money to invest it here, because they escape to Dubai and developing countries to employ people there.’’
When a government minister proposes that the only way to fight capital flight is to get those who have profited from corruption to invest in the country instead of stashing their ill-gotten gains in foreign accounts, we are doing badly.
The thing here, though, is that CS Mbadi is just echoing former president Daniel arap Moi’s position in 1991 when Kenya came under economic pressure from donors on the issue of capital flight and corruption by state officers.
It is fair to assume that most of those squirrelling their cash abroad assumed it would be harder for the loot to be traced that way. According to anecdotal evidence, it was also a way to ensure that they had homes and investments to escape to if ever things went wrong for them in Kenya.
By the way, apart from state officials, some of those involved in capital flight were also involved in the 1980s banking crisis in Kenya which saw several banks and non-banking financial institutions collapse due to factors like non-adherence to regulations, insider lending, and non-performing loans. This would eventually lead to the government tightening regulations and establishing a deposit protection fund.
In 1987, following the banking crisis and further news of capital flight, former Butere MP and anti-corruption crusader Joseph Martin Shikuku became involved. July 1987 saw Shikuku – the self-appointed “people’s watchman” – table a June 1987 IMF report in parliament showing that Kenyans had US$1.28 million (about KSh21 million at the time) stashed away abroad. A relatively small amount when you consider the billions of shillings spoken about today.
Nevertheless, the 1987 report ranked Kenya fourth in Africa in terms of capital flight. The top ten countries were Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, Zaire, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Ghana.
Even though the excitement raised by Shikuku’s action soon died down, the chatter about corruption and capital flight was never far from the surface. It would become a stick that the donor community would use to punish the government.
In November 1991, when Kenya faced a crucial Paris Club donor meeting, news stories emerged to the effect that 50 per cent of the funds held abroad by Kenyans had been moved out of the country within the previous five years.
This time frame would have coincided with Shikuku’s 1987 bombshell. The news reports, featured in the Daily Nation, were based on an IMF report leaked to journalists by Western diplomats. They claimed that funds lent to developing countries for large infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams, water schemes, and road construction had been misused by the elite in these countries for personal gain. The donors also claimed that huge commissions had been paid to these members of the political and ruling elite and stashed away in offshore accounts.
Later that month, the donors would show their dismay by suspending aid to Kenya after the meetings in Paris. This move would force President Moi’s hand to reopen the door to multi-party democracy, among other reforms.
Pressure had been building in the run-up to the Paris Club talks, obligating President Moi to use his Kenyatta Day speech to urge Kenyans who had funds outside the country to “exercise a sense of patriotism and bring such resources back to their motherland”.
Said Moi, “It makes no sense that while we continue to create an enabling environment for investment and urge foreign investors to invest in our country, some of our own people, for some strange reason, have decided to keep their money in foreign accounts.”
This was the same President Moi who had in October 1989 led a Kenya African National Union parliamentary group (KANU PG) meeting that resolved “to encourage Kenyans to go into business abroad”.
Corrupt Kenyans took this as an ingenious green light to stash their money abroad.
Meanwhile, in 1991, donor pressure also pushed the KANU government to come up with its anti-corruption legislation. Speaking in parliament during the passing of the Prevention of Corruption bill, then Vice President and Finance Minister, Professor George Saitoti claimed that no corrupt public official would be spared if found to be involved in shady monetary dealings.
Moving the motion on the bill, Saitoti said misappropriation of public funds by corrupt officials entrusted with positions of responsibility had tarnished the good name of the government in the eyes of the public and must be brought to a halt. “With the passing of this bill, we have declared a total war against corruption,” Saitoti said amidst applause from MPs.
Saitoti made all the usual correct noises about money voted by parliament for the development of public projects having to be properly utilised, with every single cent accounted for.
Using what had become a fashionable phrase in government after the murder of former Foreign Minister Robert Ouko in February 1990, Saitoti said, “The government will leave no stone unturned” in the fight against corruption. He added that those involved in corrupt practices would only have themselves to blame if they got caught.
Curiously, Saitoti also said it was necessary that members of the public stop “malicious accusations against other people”, especially without evidence. At this point, he may have been “carrying his own cross” as already there had been fingers pointed at him and others in the Moi cabinet, including the president himself.
Replying to the motion, Attorney General Amos Wako said that he had directed the commissioner of police to investigate cases of corruption and fraud involving several state corporations, and if necessary, take the culprits to court.
Wako said that those found mismanaging public funds would be severely punished. The bill was passed by the House, but it wasn’t enough to stop the aid freeze from the donors.
Looking back over the years since independence, it is plain to see that, other than paying lip service to the concept of fighting corruption, the government was just never that serious. Independent Kenya has been officially declaring its fight against corruption since the early years of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency (1963–1978).
Independence brought with it high ideals. There was talk of eliminating “poverty, ignorance and disease”, but little did the people appreciate that the only poverty being banished was that among the ruling elite.
Hopes of integrity in government were soon challenged by reports of land grabbing and favouritism in resource allocation by the late 1960s when Vice-President Moi was forced to stand up in parliament to try to show the matter was in hand.
Hopes that at least the civil service might have a chance to save the country from the rapaciousness of the politicians were dashed with the publication of the 1971 report of the Public Service Structure and Remuneration Commission (PSSRC).
Also known as the Ndegwa Commission, the PSSRC controversially allowed public service officials to engage in private business. Far from being a bulwark against corruption, this move opened the door to allow more fat cats to join in the spoils.
That same year, anti-corruption crusader and Butere MP Shikuku was one of a small group of MPs who proposed the establishment of a Parliamentary Committee against corruption. The proposal was fought by fellow MPs and never got off the ground.
In a 1992 interview with the quarterly journal Wajibu, Shikuku said, “Members of Parliament were against the motion to set up a Committee because they were afraid of what the Committee would come up with.
“I wanted all MPs to declare their wealth and to indicate how they acquired it. I declared mine, and so did the proposed members of the Committee. But most of the MPs were not clean on this score, that is why they were against the idea.”
By May 1975, buoyed by the anti-government spirit in the House and the country at large, and following the setting up of a select committee to probe the disappearance and murder of Nyandarua North MP JM Kariuki, MPs tried again.
Nobody said it at the time, perhaps because it might have been considered in poor taste following Kariuki’s murder, but the source of JM’s sudden wealth was itself questionable.
Nevertheless, Shikuku, who some at the time referred to as the “president of the poor”, tabled another motion to set up a Parliamentary Select Committee to Investigate Corruption. While the motion was carried, it was soon rescinded by another motion passed by the same House.
In the Wajibu interview, Shikuku attributed this change of mind by the MPs to fear of what such a probe might uncover about some of them and their friends in government.
At around the same time as the Parliamentary Select Committee to Investigate Corruption idea was doing the rounds, the then Principal of the Kenya Institute of Administration (KIA), Habel Nyamu, came out with a strong public critique of corruption in the civil service.
The KIA is where the country’s post-independence high cadre of civil servants and government administrative leaders were trained. It is now known as the Kenya School of Government.
What was interesting about Nyamu’s analysis was not that he was saying anything new – he wasn’t – but that, as the Weekly Review of 14 April 1975 noted, “his remarks were contained in a paper put out officially by the government itself”. Nyamu accused the civil service of being “lethargic, apathetic and having deadened sensibility.”
It was also notable for the strong language and cogent argument Nyamu used. He began gently, saying that the Civil Service inherited at independence was “by and large imbued with high principles and integrity”. Nyamu said that up until 1970 the civil service had acquitted itself with credit. It was then, he said, “that the inertia set in”.
At the same time, he said, there had been a whole set of foreign advisors, usually young and inexperienced, who “spent most of their advising days sitting in government offices in Nairobi”.
Nyamu said that this development would have been bad enough for civil service morale, and the cherry on the cake was the “ill-conceived” Ndegwa Commission on civil service salaries and terms of service. The Commission’s report allowed civil servants to engage in business, something which Nyamu felt would interfere with the proper discharge of their duties.
In his paper, Nyamu said it was futile to expect fairness from civil servants in cases where they were expected to formulate policies about the Africanisation of business premises and other properties if they could benefit directly from such policies.
“More often than not, perhaps, the civil servants will first dish out to themselves the best business premises, before bringing other people.
“The sad thing is that the Civil service owns farms, businesses, property, shares, and everything else indiscriminately. The sad thing is that the Ndegwa Commission has never been debated in parliament.”
Over the next few years there was a lot of rhetoric on fighting corruption, but implementation, if any, was weak.
President Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978 and was succeeded by Vice-President Moi. Initially, in some circles, there was hope that Moi might make fighting corruption one of his priorities, but by the end of his first year in office, there was evidence that corruption was on the increase.
At the end of 1979, it emerged that powerful individuals in the Moi government had made millions off the illegal sale of the country’s entire strategic reserve of maize.
According to journalist and researcher John Kamau, writing in the Sunday Nation of 27 November 2022, this was the first scandal of the Moi regime and it opened the door to many others.
Today it is as if Kenyans have become inured to stories of corruption or capital flight, the newspapers no longer report statements about the government claiming to fight corruption with the same wide-eyed innocence of the 1960s.
Where once US$1.2 million held abroad by Kenyans was a fantastic sum, nowadays it might be considered peanuts.
Over the years allegations of corruption in high places have faced such significant political interference and resistance from powerful figures in the government, that they no longer appear to have much effect on the public.
Perhaps this is why in the weeks since Mbadi’s statement, there appears not to have been significant pushback and people have just accepted the situation and moved on.
