Paying a water bill at Nairobi Town Hall used to be an exercise in frustration, with long lines of customers stretching out the door as civil servants demanded bribes to straighten out error-filled accounts.
Now Town Hall is plastered with anti-corruption posters and memos insisting that staff carry out business behind the counter rather than in dark corners. A huge green suggestion box sits just outside the door, near a corruption-reporting kiosk offering pamphlets on “Fighting Corruption–A Shared Responsibility.”
Since Kenya’s graft-battling president, Mwai Kibaki, came to power six months ago, the time needed to pay a water bill has been reduced to less than one minute.
“Before, you could waste your time here. Now they serve without wasting your time,” said Barnard Njuru, an office clerk who stopped by recently to settle his account.
Kibaki’s new anti-corruption drive, Njuru said, means he no longer has to pay a bribe to see a doctor or hand over a few bills to the traffic policeman asking for “a little something for tea.”
“We have seen a lot of changes already, and we are full of confidence in our president,” he said, smiling. “This has to work.”
Kenya’s popular leader has launched an unprecedented drive to root out the deep-seated blight that strangled Kenya’s economy and the nation’s hopes for decades under former President Daniel arap Moi.
In his first months in office, Kibaki has made Kenya’s leading anti-graft watchdog his new anti-corruption czar, launched investigations of a top judge and fired others, replaced civil servants in key procurement jobs, and reopened stalled court investigations of top officials and businessmen.
“Corruption has undermined our economy, our politics and our national psyche,” the 71-year-old president told parliament earlier this year.
Now Kenya, considered the sixth most graft-ridden nation in the world by Transparency International, a Berlin-based organization that monitors perceptions of corruption, is working toward a climate of “zero tolerance,” Kibaki said.
Graft is ingrained
No one doubts that Kibaki is serious. But rooting out a culture of corruption at all levels of society, changing decades-old business practices, and taking on wealthy and powerful Kenyans, who have fed on graft for years, is proving anything but easy, particularly on a continent where corruption remains deeply entrenched.
Kibaki’s coalition government includes top ministers and officials who spent years working closely under Moi before abandoning the corrupt ruling party in the last election. Some, like Kibaki himself–a former Moi vice president–are seen as committed to change. Others, analysts fear, are just looking for new opportunities.
“As long as the Moi ministers are left in place, they know how to be predators on the economy,” said Mutahi Ngunyi, a Nairobi political columnist and researcher for Consult-Afrika. “Now they are just doing it in a more clever way.
“When you go to a public office, they won’t tell you openly what they want. They just speak to you in a way that you will know what they are asking for.”
Open demands for bribes have given way to wads of cash slipped into pockets at private parties, graft that leaves no record and is hard to prove, analysts said, and corrupt businessmen have wasted no time trying to co-opt new Kibaki officials.
John Githongo, the widely respected former head of Transparency International and now Kibaki’s anti-corruption czar, says powerful Kenyans seeking favors have gone so far as to offer cash to his friends and family, people “whose phone calls you have to answer,” he said.
Githongo, whose governance and ethics office is the only ministry to sit near Kibaki’s at the presidential palace, admits to being “the least popular guy around” with Kenya’s corrupt elite. He is shadowed by a bodyguard and has a 24-hour armed guard outside his house.
But the president has lived up to his promises to deal with any corruption case brought before him–those in his government as well those left from Moi’s government, Githongo said.
“The day that goes, I’m out,” Githongo promised.
For now, “we’re winning,” he said. “We’ll know in the next 12 months if it will work.”
Kibaki’s anti-graft drive has proved hugely popular with average Kenyans, most of whom live in poverty after years of economic stagnation brought on in part by rampant high-level theft.
Huge public losses
A recent United Nations study suggests that corruption resulted in losses of nearly $2billion from Kenya’s public coffers in the past decade. Under Moi’s regime, some Kenyans paid as much as a third of their income in petty bribes, Transparency International said.
In the early days of Kibaki’s anti-graft drive, passengers on Kenya’s buses and taxi vans, the infamous matatus, turned on police officers demanding bribes, beating some of the officers and meeting their traditional demands for “a little something for tea” with their own demand: “Give everything back!”
“There’s a big change in Kenya, and we’re very proud of it,” said Zaggy Mutinda, a conductor on one Nairobi matatu line. “Things aren’t perfect yet. Maybe it’s 60 percent better. It’ll never be 100 percent but maybe it’ll go to 75 percent,” he said.
Curbing graft in the long run, he and others said, will require boosting the salaries of some of the country’s lowest-paid civil servants, which the government is moving to do.
Even more important, analysts said, is changing the climate of impunity and enacting laws to stop corruption before it starts.
Under Kibaki’s administration, officials and civil servants must declare their wealth before taking public office and upon leaving their jobs. New auditing rules and codes of public conduct have been established.
The administration also has launched a public inquiry into the Goldenberg scandal, which funneled several hundred million dollars in government support funds for diamond and gold exports to friends of top government ministers in the early 1990s. Kenya produces almost no diamonds or gold.
The new administration “has managed to tackle the inertia and impunity of the past,” said Mwalimu Mati, the acting Kenyan head of Transparency International.
Mati said the challenge is to institutionalize the changes before the president’s popularity wanes and Kenya’s corrupt figure out how to effectively fight back.
The potential payoffs for changing Kenya’s culture of corruption are huge.
Most international aid to Kenya ended in 2000, when the International Monetary Fund, fed up with assistance payments going into the pockets of the rich, cut off payments.
Now the IMF is convinced Kibaki is serious about combating corruption and is preparing to resume assistance to Kenya, which could bring in millions of dollars over the next few years.
Kenyans also stand to benefit as tax dollars go into public coffers rather than private bank accounts.
In a hugely popular move, Kibaki upon taking office eliminated school fees for grade school children, allowing hundreds of thousands of cash-strapped parents to put their children in classrooms for the first time.
Already street crime has plunged in Nairobi as urchins spend their days in class rather than picking pockets. Tax funds could help provide new classrooms to ease the current crowding.
“Give us five years, and you’ll see a different Kenya,” promised John Ndive, a taxi driver in Nairobi. “Kibaki is a hero for sure. We are a different country now.”
