East Or West? What Africans Think of China and America,Between The

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo

That a major contest has kicked off between the US and China over their influence in Africa is now abundantly clear, an integral part of the monumental spat between the two superpowers that blew out into the open under President Trump — partly articulated in America’s 2017 National Security Strategy — but whose essentials are clearly being retained by the Biden administration. China is now considered America’s most significant geopolitical competitor and threat, a posture that is reciprocated by Beijing.

Still, it is also obvious that the US is racing to catch up with a China that has dramatically deepened and expanded its relations with Africa since the early 2000s. Ironically, just as the US was checking out of Africa in terms of trade and development and focussing instead on security — and in particular on the so-called “war on terror” — China shifted gear, especially through its giant Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). According to the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, China has made a total value of US$303.24 billion in investments and construction in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2005. Indeed, by 2019 one in five major infrastructure projects in Africa was financed by China and one in three was being constructed by Chinese companies. China is now Africa’s biggest trading partner and, under President Xi Jinping, the country has rapidly expanded its cultural, social, military and other relations with African countries. In typical Chinese style, this scale-up has been both huge, efficient and rapid. In East Africa, it is estimated that 55 per cent of all large-scale construction projects are undertaken by the Chinese who also finance a quarter of them. There has been considerable controversy about the extent to which these projects have contributed to a deepening debt crisis on the continent. The opacity and alleged corruption that surround the accumulation of this debt have also been the cause of deepening concern for policymakers and citizens alike. That said, the infrastructure projects align most closely with the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) — currently our biggest “existential project” as Africans. The relationship between Africa and China is complicated. Indeed, relations with all great powers are complex and difficult for developing countries.

The Chinese model

A majority of African countries are aspiring democracies in one form or another. This democratisation stated after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and by 1995, multiparty democratic constitutions had been promulgated across the continent. The US was a prominent driver of this process and at that point, the West’s push converged with the will of a majority of Africans exhausted by the single-party regimes and dictatorships that had ruled since independence. Today we can agree that the quality of this democracy varies considerably from country to country.

What is increasingly referred to as the “China model” is most obviously not a liberal democracy. All serious polling done by respected organisations such as Afrobarometer confirms that a majority of Africans continue to favour democracy — despite its messiness — over other forms of governance. I should think that this is in part because between independence and the early 1990s, Africa tried a wild assortment of authoritarian models of governance. These were stifling at best and disastrous at worst, especially when led by military cabals who had taken power through violent coups.

By 2019, one in five major infrastructure projects in Africa was financed by China and one in three was being constructed by Chinese companies.

The freedoms that have come with our democracies have in turn become embedded in our broader governance DNA, with our young population unable to conceive of a time when their basic freedoms of thought, speech, association, movement, etc., could be dramatically curtailed. And yet, the “China model” of an authoritarian system that combines a high level of state capacity to deliver public goods such as health, education, etc., to the majority of its people rapidly and on a vast scale cannot be dismissed off-hand.

On the African continent, the Rwandan and Ethiopian models have been compared to the Chinese model. The engagement with China, including its controversial debt-related aspects, has been transformative, especially in regard to the development of critical infrastructure. This cannot be argued with. And this transformation has taken place with unprecedented speed, changing skylines across a continent which has some of the world’s fastest growing cities and the world’s youngest, most rapidly growing population.

Still, the opacity and corruption that sometimes seems to typify the accumulation of commercial debt has been particularly troublesome in a range of developing countries around the world. This is still playing out and African countries are in the middle of a delicate diplomatic balancing act between a risen China, a giant and often thin-skinned partner, and a West that is now in aggressive competition with China. We are caught in between. Western nations are also increasingly vociferous in their complaints about human rights abuses in China. The human rights situation vis-à-vis minorities such as the Uyghurs of Xinjiang Province and the peoples of Tibet has for decades been the source of intense advocacy among human rights activists. The recent governance overhaul backwards in Hong Kong and apparently upcoming one in Taiwan have caused similar distress. Understandably, African policymakers have been profoundly circumspect about joining in these calls. This is despite the fact that African states have over the last 30 years gradually become less tolerant of gross human rights abuses on the continent. Coups are generally a no-no in this day and age, and a state that deliberately seeks to destroy an ethnic group would cause even the usually politically judicious African Union to voice strong opposition. This is in part because orchestrated mass violence against particular groups in one country inevitably spills across our fake borders. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was, and remains, profoundly chilling.

China has been steadfast in its policy of non-interference in the governance of other nations, a stance which is deeply appreciated by an Africa that is finding its voice. Supporters of democracy point out that this approach can sometimes end up propping up some of the most incompetent and dictatorial regimes on the continent. The West has its list of similar clients too though. Suffice it to say that China also retains currency among African elites because it has never been a colonial power on the continent despite China’s Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) and his fleets visiting the East African coast several times between 1405 and 1433. China’s engagement with Africa back then contrasts starkly with Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama’s blood-soaked expeditions in the region from 1497 as he sought a plunder route to India. From the 1950s onwards, China also contributed significantly to African liberation struggles, often in direct opposition to the US and its allies.

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From the language and tone over the last few years, one would be forgiven for believing that the US is ready to adopt a Cold War posture with China. There is nothing that causes greater nervousness among African policymakers than the continent finding itself forced into the kind of stark polarity President George W. Bush encapsulated on the 20th of September 2001 when he told the world, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. This time around however, the relationship between China and Africa is very different from the one Africa had with the Communist bloc in the period after independence. Whereas ideology and the practicalities of the struggle for independence were at the heart of the Cold War relationship, for African elites in particular, China today is first and foremost a development partner. Besides, the Cold War posture was also generally bad for basic freedoms.

From the language and tone over the last few years, one would be forgiven for believing that the US is ready to adopt a Cold War posture with China.

Part of the challenge the US faces as it ramps up the contest with China is one of perceptions: the “shithole” countries, as President Trump called them, aren’t that shitty to other countries that have travelled the difficult development road we are on. For urbanised African youth with access to the internet, the America they view and read about today isn’t necessarily the one America’s unrivalled soft power juggernaut, Hollywood, portrays. A significant amount of bandwidth is instead taken up watching black people being murdered by a clearly systemically racist police force and the ensuing consequences. However, it is also part of the fundamental dynamism of US democracy that President Biden and his team have made so many progressive policy U-turns since taking office 100 days ago. Since he took office Biden’s administration has overseen the vaccination of over 130 million Americans – half the population!

Africans still overwhelmingly support the democratic model but feel the relationship with China is a win-win for Africa. Other critical rising powers

While there has been considerable focus on China, India, Russia, Turkey and other rising nations have raised their profiles in Africa as well. They have done so without much fanfare but in a manner that has afforded local elites policy choices that were unthinkable as recently as the 2010s. The Russia-Africa Sochi Summit in late 2019, for example, was part of an accelerated engagement by Russia with Africa over the past decade especially in the extractive sector and military trade. Today Russia is by far the continent’s largest arms supplier, accounting for almost half of all military sales to Africa. In 2019, 12 African ministers of foreign affairs visited Russia, and that country’s long serving minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, and his deputy Mikhail Bogdanov, held talks with nearly 100 top African politicians between January and September 2019 alone. Bogdanov is said to maintain sustained intensive interactions with African Ambassadors in Moscow. While Russian policymakers emphasise a deepening of “political cooperation” with Africa, they have indicated heightened interest in economic relations — especially in the extractive sector, agriculture, health and education. The speed with which Russia developed its Sputnik V vaccine was startling and its “vaccine diplomacy” in Africa has been more aggressive and successful than that of any other region. Welcome to our new multi-polar world.

What Africans think of China

As I said, Africans still overwhelmingly support the democratic model but feel the relationship with China is a win-win for Africa — with China winning more of course — being qualitatively different from the relationship with the West. Source: Source: What Africans think about China: Findings from Afrobarometer, E. Gyimah-Boadi, CEO, Afrobarometer, February 2021

Afrobarometer recently polled African attitudes towards China in 22 countries including Ethiopia, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Uganda, Nigeria, Angola, Namibia, Zambia among others. In the 22 countries, an average of 33 per cent of those polled thought the US was the best model for development. Twenty-three per cent felt China was the best model of development followed by former colonial powers at 11 per cent and South Africa at 10 per cent. China is emphatically the preferred model for development in Benin, Burkina Faso and Mali. In Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone and Cape Verde the US is by far the preferred model. In Kenya 43 per cent of respondents prefer the US model compared to 23 per cent who prefer the Chinese model.

Source: What Africans think about China: Findings from Afrobarometer, E. Gyimah-Boadi, CEO, Afrobarometer, February 2021

Importantly, 62 per cent of all those polled across Africa felt China has a largely positive economic and political influence on their countries while 60 per cent felt the same for the US. Source: What Africans think about China: Findings from Afrobarometer, E. Gyimah-Boadi, CEO, Afrobarometer, February 2021

Indeed, the main takeaways of the Afrobarometer report released in February 2021 include the fact that Africans feel generally positive about China. Significantly, according to the researchers,

“Though new on the block, the attractiveness of China’s development model is second only to the US (especially among older adults). Perceived Chinese influence is on a par with that of the US and well above that of the former colonial powers. Chinese economic and political influence is seen in largely positive terms. Respondents who feel positively about the influence of China also tend to have positive views of U.S. influence as well – suggesting that for many Africans, U.S.-China “competition” may not be an “either-or” but a “win-win” proposition. Popular awareness of China as a lender/giver of development aid to African respective countries is unmatched by the common place talk of Chinese “debt trap” diplomacy in Africa… Be that as it may, a plurality of Chinese loan aware Africans perceive fewer strings attached to those loans/development compared to other donors. Awareness of repayment obligations to Chinese loans/aid is however high among those who know about Chinese loans/aid to their country – suggesting the need for more information sharing about Chinese aid. Indeed, awareness of Chinese loans to the country generally goes hand in hand with expression of concern about the entailed indebtedness…”

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The former top Singaporean diplomat, academic and author of Has China Won?, Kishore Mahbubani, argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the shift of global power from West to East. He points out that from 1AD until 1820 the world’s largest economies were India and China and that the last 200 years of Western domination are a historical aberration. All aberrations ultimately end. We are living through these tectonic changes. Exciting times. Nothing expresses the contradictions that this means in our daily lives than the way our urban youth use their mobile phones and American platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as instruments of accountability in a complex age.

It is ironic too that the murder of George Floyd by a white policeman that caused such powerful global outrage last year was filmed by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier using her iPhone made in China and uploaded onto American social media platforms not allowed in China, provoking a powerful reaction that continues to reverberate around the world.

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The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo Kenyans on Twitter (#KOT) – a fraternity not to be messed with on global social media – recently took on the IMF following the announcement that the Fund had approved another US$2.34 billion facility for the Kenyan government. The loan is intended to mitigate the fiscal crunch that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. #KOT’s concern was that the current ruling elite is so corrupt that not only have they stolen and misspent what they had previously borrowed, leading to a public debt portfolio of US$70 billion and rising, they will steal and misspend this new amount as well.

The IMF was forced to respond virtually – which was interesting – explaining the governance conditionalities attached to this latest facility. The Fund’s explanation did little to calm Kenyans and the debate still rages; for many, simply put, the IMF is being asked why it is serving whiskey to an alcoholic on condition that the alcoholic only takes a tot a day and imbibes “carefully”. Kenyans on Twitter believe they know their government better; they are likely right. Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned, the IMF toolkit is limited – the austerity spanner, loan wrench, conditionality screwdrivers and advisory nuts and bolts, these have been used before, in the 1990s, but this time the consumer is far more sceptical, and with good reason.

We are in the middle of major political realignments as we head into the 2022 general election, with President Uhuru Kenyatta currently serving his last term but clearly keen on a transition that will leave his family’s influence intact. The overall behaviour of the regime, and the elite at its core, is imbued with an assumption of impunity; they have since independence eluded accountability. This impunity gene in our politics can be traced back to the creation of Kenya by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA), a group of businessmen with a royal charter to grab, tax, kill and essentially enslave the population at will. A combination of corruption, profligacy, incompetence, rapacious personalised accumulation, spiralling debt and now the devastating COVID-19 epidemic has – ironically – created the circumstances for the elite to think its way out of a crisis of its own making; as they say, never let a good crisis go to waste. Indeed, others have been here before.

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Some senior civil servants – and even the president himself, so I am told – are known to be fans of Lee Kuan Yew’s book From Third World to First: The Singapore Story – 1965-2000 and share it liberally among colleagues. If they have read it, it is not always clear that they have understood it. A number of Asian countries – notably Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and to a lesser extent Thailand and Malaysia – used the crisis conditions following the Second World War to change the behaviour of their elite and transform their economies and societies. As Ken Ohashi – one-time Senior Economic Advisor to the Kenyan Presidency – explained in a feature carried in The Standard, the East Asian success stories emerged significantly out of a shift away from an “elite-favouring, rent-seeking centred economy” to economies structured to advance when individuals and companies come up with new ideas and are spurred by fair competition. Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore in particular took a dramatic shift away from our elite’s rent-seeking model of business.

In South Korea, President Park Chung-hee, who came to power in a military coup in 1961, ended the Kenyan style of corruption-oriented business by the political and commercial elite. He called in leaders of the traditional, largely family-owned businesses (the chaebols) and essentially forced them to become internationally competitive manufacturers. Ultimately, the majority couldn’t survive in an environment where they could not manipulate government policy and fiddle the books. But the Samsungs, Hyundais etc., flourished and are global giants today. As Ohashi argues, “Corruption never disappeared, but it ceased to be the mainstay of business strategy . . . Taiwan and Singapore managed to revamp the fundamental business culture in a similar way and created an environment in which most companies focused singularly on producing competitive and increasingly higher-value products.”

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In Kenya’s history, the Jubilee regime has been the most sophisticated at managing the perceptions of its performance. Jubilee’s launches of bridges, roads, government programmes and other initiatives are slick and the speeches well written. This is true even when they are launching the same project multiple times. They have also spent more money than any other previous regime doing this. However, in the digital age, they have ultimately struggled and the narrative their media managers try to sell is so far removed from reality that the entire enterprise – even augmented by the likes of Cambridge Analytica – has collapsed in on itself.

This demonstrates the impact social media has had on the political terrain not only in Kenya but all over the world. As governments have become increasingly authoritarian and as the globalisation model has faltered, social media has become a space that is freer than the streets, particularly for the youth. As a result, more and more governments across the developing world have resorted to private intelligence, PR and other reputational management companies to manage this space while others, especially during elections, simply switch off the internet, a tactic that Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Benin, Rwanda, Morocco, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda have resorted to in the recent past. However, this is not so easy in economies with a reasonably developed service sector and a relatively high use of financial technology.

In Kenya we have several governance balls in the air at the same time: elections (traditionally our season of grand theft); President Uhuru Kenyatta’s transition as he serves out his final term amid talk of changing the constitution and even holding a referendum to effect the change; spiralling corruption and debt; and the return of IMF conditionalities of the kind last witnessed in the 1990s. This time, however, and as I mentioned above, the IMF is confronted with a totally new demographic across Africa. It is overwhelmingly young – below 35; increasingly interconnected by technology; mistrustful of the World Banks and IMFs of this world, and also more aware of the inequities that the elites have wrought in the pre-pandemic era of globalisation. Kenya’s political elite: hardened and resilient mystifiers

Still, Kenya has one of the continent’s most experienced and resilient political elites. They have over 50 years of experience in political wheeler-dealing, skulduggery, deal-making and sharing the loot from public coffers – uninterrupted by coups, major social meltdowns or grand economic experiments. The odd thing about the corruption perpetrated by an even minimally coherent elite is that it produces a stagnating political stability so long as there is enough loot to share around. It is not an ideal situation and it is fraught with deepening inequality and declining public trust in governance institutions and in the politicians themselves. Still, the guys at the top can hold on and even sustain a hegemon on the basis of backroom deals, understandings and accommodations. And with the right foreign friends this job is made even easier.

Currently, there is considerable bewilderment about the Kenyatta succession as our politicians position themselves for the 2022 elections. Part of this is deliberate mystification. Newspaper headlines sometimes seem to derive from a single photo of politicians at a meeting posted on Twitter where it’s not at all clear what the discussions were about. The mystification is also in part caused by the fact that there are no ideological or significant policy differences between the different competitors for the presidency. Even COVID-19 – the disruptor of the century – hasn’t changed their modus operandi.

The odd thing about the corruption perpetrated by an even minimally coherent elite is that it produces a stagnating political stability so long as there is enough loot to share around.

The pandemic has stripped naked the governance models of all nations and it has been surprising to see what is hidden underneath all the constitutions, institutions, platitudes and political theatre. It has led to a resurgence of authoritarianism where democracy was already in recession globally and there is disquiet that some states will fail. Add to this the fact that China is now a risen power and for the first time, under President Xi, is directly marketing its technocratic/meritocratic authoritarian model as an alternative to liberal democracy which is noisy and free but which can, as a result, be slower in delivering public goods and has, in recent years, produced dangerously comical leaders in some of the most developed countries in the world. China will clearly play a significant role in defining the post-pandemic geopolitical reality.

For our ruling elite, however, the confusion is compounded by the 2010 Constitution which has placed severe limitations on their capacity to disrupt both each other and the governance institutions for their personal political ends. Indeed, the 2010 Constitution was written specifically because of the elite’s penchant to manipulate the previous constitution to their political advantage, as witnessed from 1964 to the late 1990s. Some have described it as a “rule book for naughty boys”, full of self-executing provisions and with a level of detail in terms of institutional design that betrays a lack of trust on the part of its drafters that the elite have any real fidelity to the spirit of the document.

Kenyatta Inc.

What our current elite does now will determine what Kenya will look like in the coming decades. It is thus that Uhuru Kenyatta, who should be a lame duck by now, continues to play an energetic role in his own succession – not necessarily because of his grip on political matters but because of the Kenyattas’ unique private commercial achievements. In fact, there is some concern that all the realignments and political shenanigans could make the 2022 polls more destabilising than previous transition elections. Traditionally, incumbency elections in Kenya – where a head of state is going into elections to compete for another term – are the most violent, as was the case in 1992, 1997 and 2007. Transition elections, on the other hand, when a head of state is serving his last term, as in 2002 and 2013, are far more peaceful.

The Kenyatta family enterprise, whose foundation is built on land acquired during President Jomo Kenyatta’s tenure between 1964 and 1978, is now a highly diversified fledging multinational, with Brookside Dairies as its flagship and significant international shareholding. These commercial interests have been expanded, diversified and consolidated during Uhuru Kenyatta’s tenure as president. Chapter VI of the constitution on Leadership and Integrity – especially those of its provisions that touch on conflict of interest – does not exist in our political reality.

Meanwhile, public debt has accumulated so rapidly under the Kenyatta regime – Kenyans believe that much of it has been misappropriated – that the mess in public finances no longer has a technical fix, only a political one. Indeed, the outrage expressed by Kenyans on social media at the IMF’s US$2.3 billion facility was caused by the belief among many that this money will also be stolen. Some of the conditionalities the IMF has insisted on in apparent good faith – such as the reform of key state-owned enterprises – were particularly controversial because of the conviction among some that this was a green light for them to be taken over by the very people who precipitated the debt crisis in the first place.

Chapter VI of the constitution on Leadership and Integrity – especially those of its provisions that touch on conflict of interest – does not exist in our political reality.

Local real estate company Knight Frank estimated that by last year Kenya had over 3,000 dollar millionaires. The question that looms over the succession and transition currently underway – and which may explain why it is so confusing – is this: a small group of families have emerged from the last eight years spectacularly wealthy; how do they protect this wealth going forward? Similar questions faced elites in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, etc., especially after the Second World War, but the elites in those countries ultimately chose a generally inclusive form of meritocratic governance.

There are many elites who, having accumulated wealth which they wish to protect in perpetuity, choose to securitise and militarise their politics – essentially throw liberal constitutions out of the window and hold on to the power to steal through a mixture of manipulation, bribery and force. There are those who would argue that the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) is a vehicle to politically engineer the elite out of the structures imposed on them by the current constitution and essentially emerge with a political deal that serves all their political and commercial interests. Others argue that the elite inclusivity that informs the Building Bridges Initiative – expensive as it will be – is just what Kenya needs. This is a considerably more uncertain model than, say, the Taiwanese or South Korean ones, where the elites fashioned a political and constitutional arrangement that served not just their own interests but those of the entire population as well. Securing the peace and prosperity of the masses is the surest protection for the wealth of the elite.

The combination of factors – the impact of COVID-19; upcoming elections with all the realignments they imply; a volatile region; increasingly unmanageable debt; and, most importantly, the demographic challenge of a now thoroughly disillusioned youth who no longer believe politicians or trust their own governance institutions – will force some of the most consequential choices our hardened elite have ever made. Multinationals like the Kenyattas’ need political predictability and policy consistency unless they are in the extractive sector, selling alcohol, drugs or cigarettes rather than perishables like milk and yoghurt.

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East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo

On the 2nd of September 2017, an angry President Kenyatta lashed out at the Judiciary after the Supreme Court invalidated the presidential election results, a full-frontal verbal attack against the judiciary by the head of state, unprecedented in the country’s history. In the past, manipulations of the judiciary were always carried out quietly through political manoeuvring, the public only coming to learn of the interference through the media. “We shall revisit this thing. We clearly have a problem”, Kenyatta said, referring to the judiciary. “Who even elected you? Were you? We have a problem and we must fix it”, he said, speaking on live television at State House in Nairobi after a meeting with governors and other elected officials from his Jubilee party.

The not so strange case of Governor Mike Sonko

At the beginning of December, the governor of Nairobi, Mike Mbuvi Sonko, was sensationally arrested in Voi on a number of charges including corruption. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of his arrest dominated the media over the following days.

It was a most dramatic action, carried out against our most colourful and most controversial of governors, but deep down, no one was really surprised that the arrest of the governor of the capital city had been turned into a circus; sadly, it is something Kenyans have become inured to.

But this is partly because Mike Sonko is also an authentic grassroots populist with a genuine constituency of support especially among the poor of Eastern Nairobi who first elected him to parliament in 2010. Sonko’s life story is a weave of narratives that the poor relate to at a personal level. His life prior to entering politics was characterised by run-ins with the law, including an escape from prison in the 1990s. His unfiltered style of speaking and his acts of calculated philanthropy have turned him into something of a Robin Hood.

Once when Sonko, then a senator, was picked up by the police, a crowd of his supporters showed up outside the police station shouting, “Mwizi wetu, mwizi wetu!” (Our thief! Our thief!). While we in the generally ideologically vacuous middle-class cringe and guffaw, Sonko and others of his ilk have transformed Kenyan politics in ways similar to what Duterte has done in the Philippines, Trump in America, Urban in Hungary, etc. This is because it is clear to his supporters that Sonko hasn’t been conjured up by branding professionals and PR specialists—he is his own brand. Indeed, Sonko has been at the forefront of redefining what normal political behaviour is in Kenya; what politicians say and how they say it; what they do and how they do it—just how garish and outrageous a public officer can be. He simply doesn’t bother to pretend; if he feels it, he expresses it in the most dramatic manner possible. In the crudest of ways, “he keeps it real”. Moses Kuria is of the same populist mould, as are Aisha Jumwa in Malindi, Oscar Sudi in the Rift Valley, etc. Our politics is increasingly replete with men and women who say on the platform what is usually said in the bar or the bedroom.

While we in the generally ideologically vacuous middle-class cringe and guffaw, Sonko and others of his ilk have transformed Kenyan politics in ways similar to what Duterte has done in the Philippines, Trump in America, Urban in Hungary, etc.

This “explicit” truth has found currency; it excites the multitude who believe that the other politicians are mostly lying. The vulgarisation of the public discourse is now complete and wananchi seem to love it not least because, especially in these difficult economic times, it is also a slap in the face of the wincing, apparently clueless, middle class and its political representatives.

This type of politician, blunt and openly estranged from the truth—part performer and often entertainer—has become more influential in public affairs since 2013. This is a global phenomenon as the neo-liberal economic model fails vast swathes of the citizenry who have come to the realisation that companies, or cartels masquerading as companies, are today far more powerful than governments, judiciaries, parliaments and other governance institutions. Indeed, the grand “institutions” that for over half a century development professionals have insisted are the pillars of peaceful, prosperous, equitable and free societies are under strain in many places and have altogether ceased to function in others. In the field of anti-corruption, experts are whispering to each other that perhaps too much has been made of building institutions over the last 30 years. Some experts point out, for example, that on the corruption index the north of Italy consistently scores better than the south despite both regions sharing governance institutions for several generations. It has become clear that there are many countries where the shadow state—comprised of a vast network of informal relations between the civil service, politicians, business, the security sector, the church and the media among others—is more important to understand than the laws in place to fight graft.

This is a global phenomenon as the neo-liberal economic model fails vast swathes of the citizenry who have come to the realisation that companies, or cartels masquerading as companies, are today far more powerful than governments

Under these circumstances, promises made are not kept and the wider public has realised that there isn’t even much effort being made to keep them. The 2013 Jubilee manifesto is a striking example of this trend. Indeed, it has become clear that many of its policy proposals were a fiction or an opportunity to create slush funds disguised as policy proposals, the verbiage therein being part of the theatre in which we willingly or unwillingly participate. It makes for a toxic environment, bereft of trust and goodwill. Unfortunately, given the current strains, the mechanisms of a modern society’s self-correction—in particular the elections that allow for regular renewal—have in many countries been captured by a tiny elite.

The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) that emerged out of a political truce between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga in March last year was to some another opportunity for a political reboot. This was especially the case following the 2017 election debacle that left the regime bereft of legitimacy. But it is the scale of these expectations that caused the BBI report to underwhelm and disappoint so many. The BBI team rose out of the Kenyan political swamp and led the population to believe that they would tell us how to drain it. Instead, they seem only to continue wallowing in it, deepening the disconcerting confusion prevailing in these times of economic austerity. It is in this light that we must understand how figures like Sonko have come to occupy so much political bandwidth.

It is within this context Uhuru Kenyatta has overseen the most corrupt administration in Kenya’s history while at the same time having his technical agencies expend the greatest amount of energy and resources purporting to fight corruption. This incongruity is derived partly from Kenyatta’s own familial circumstances; he speaks eloquently against conflict of interest in public service while sitting on a fortune created by that very conflict of interest.

Kenya’s elite consensus: Let’s eat!

Elites generally compete for power in Kenya so they can “eat”; development is extracurricular. Within the elite, however, a consensus is necessary for the “eating” to be “inclusive”. Competition, especially for lucrative public works contracts, is fiercest and most intense as the size of the pie shrinks and the elite fragments. This almost always leads to a dramatic decline in civic hygiene, often to civil rancour and sometimes even to civil strife.

Our transforming political culture has left us in an invidious position. For the first time, even though we know that all politicians lie, now we really cannot tell the truth from the lies so we mistrust everything. This infectious condition has helped exacerbate the split in the ruling Jubilee party; there are now two powerful amalgams of competing political and commercial interests—Jubilee A (behind Kenyatta and Odinga) and Jubilee B (allied to Deputy President William Ruto). A host of other smaller political parties hover around these two giants, negotiating their place at the trough.

The coarsening of public debate has been fuelled in part by the immediacy and anonymity social media provides, but overall it has made serious debate on shared challenges all the more difficult in a complex, rapidly changing, ideologically vacant, intellectually dumbed down but emotionally charged environment. From Kenya’s independence until the early 1990s, eloquent sycophancy was easier to interpret and manage because every mwananchi knew that it was just that—sycophantic babble. Sometimes we even pitied the babblers: “Poor fellow, having to embarrass themselves to keep the president happy”. The sycophant’s lies were different from those of today’s populists who push buttons related exclusively to group fears, antagonisms, worries and stereotypes. In the golden age of the sycophant, from 1963 to 1992, a number of important economic, political and social pillars remained true, retained their integrity and became the beacons that informed public discourse. Even in the most oppressive days of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, Kenyans could trust the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC); a degree from a Kenyan university was a serious instrument of achievement; the government’s budget, read once a year, was treated as credible; the church was an institution to which the truth could comfortably retreat; the Kenya Army was considered professional and clean; the headlines of the Daily Nation and the Standard and magazines like the Weekly Review, Gitobu Imanyara’s original Nairobi Law Monthly, Society, Beyond, The People and others, were not doubted, and the IMF, World Bank, etc., were believed. This is the case no more—many named here have been bastardised or had doubts cast upon their credibility.

And so it is that even as Mike Sonko fights his corruption and other charges, there are many more Sonkos waiting to emerge over the coming few years.

(Additional research by Salma Mwangola)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo

Kenya’s elite is founded primarily on corruption and conflict of interest. Some observers claim that this is not unusual at this stage of our development where the government is the largest business in town and all the significant private sector players must interact with it. The line between where the public ends and the private begins can at times become blurred, and so, for our elite, a serious anti- corruption drive is akin to suicide.

In Kenya, a sort of consensus has held sway among the elite since independence: during his tenure, the president’s tribe “eats” more than the others while they await their turn. A similar informal arrangement holds in Nigeria where the presidency shifts from North to South, giving each amalgam of ethnic groups their turn to “eat” in this oil rich country that now has more people living in poverty than India. These informal arrangements often have greater currency than formal governance institutions. The police can arrest someone for an offence but ultimate punishment is entirely dependent on the complex and constantly shifting web of relationships that dictate who can steal, how much and for how long. The tribe “in power”—even if not in office—has the greatest access to economic opportunity and justice.

Millennial Hope

An important caveat at this point is that Kenya’s millennial generation—particularly urbanites—has started to shake off some of these links. It is a slow process that is expressed primarily by that generation’s rate of inter-tribal marriage, the highest since independence. They rage on social media against the incompetence and greed of all the previous generations that have left them to face the complexities of today’s rapidly changing society, economy and politics without the benefit of preparation from wiser elders.

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Throughout the 1990s, the most articulate and forceful opposition to President Moi’s authoritarian and corrupt regime came from the Kikuyu and the Luo communities. The Kikuyu middle class in the church, civil society and the media was vocal and relentless against the “corrupt dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi”. Unfortunately for Moi, the Cold War ended in 1991 and his Western allies dumped him almost as quickly as they dumped Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. The local pro-democracy energy dissipated immediately a Kikuyu, Mwai Kibaki, became President in 2002 and did not return with the election of Uhuru Kenyatta, another Kikuyu.

The President’s ethnic mobilisation has been so thorough that even as the economy now flounders under the weight of Jubilee’s graft and incompetence, well-off Kikuyus are nervously whispering “what next?” to each other as Uhuru serves out his final constitutionally mandated term.

The lengths to which educated, reasonably sensible people will go to rationalise the excesses of the current regime is astounding. A commonly touted narrative is that President Kenyatta’s failure has been caused by a constitution that tied his hands behind his back and made it a nightmare for him to expeditiously solve Kenya’s most pressing problems. This gobbledygook is self-reinforcing as people do all they can to convince themselves that the absurd is normal. This social reengineering has been accompanied by a retreat to the church; as the rationalisations fail to gain traction, they are rendered, through a variety of crusades and fellowships, by all manner of bishops, prophets, prelates, brothers and other holy men and women, into a realm where to question the absurd is to sin.

In an ethnically polarised contest it is dangerous for a tribal kingpin to relinquish power in the midst of an economic meltdown, political confusion and a fragmented elite

I’m fairly certain that if a non-Kikuyu replaces Kenyatta, the Kikuyu middle class will be back starting NGOs, weaponising the media along tribal lines, establishing think-tanks and waxing eloquent on corruption, transparency, accountability and human rights. But this time, more than at any other since independence, the mood among the other communities will likely be cynical if not outright hostile.

Indeed, it was quickly clear that when Uhuru Kenyatta became president in 2013 he was sensitive to these powerful ethnic sentiments. While also working to preserve his family’s legacy, Uhuru spoke often and persuasively about the evils of graft and what he intended to do about it. In an ethnically polarised contest it is dangerous for a tribal kingpin to relinquish power in the midst of an economic meltdown, political confusion and a fragmented elite and so, Kenyatta’s anti-corruption drive now has three clear phases impelled in part by these realities.

The Age of Speeches and Plunder

In the first phase, between 2013 and 2014, the government’s energies were concentrated on fighting off the International Criminal Court (ICC) and it was during this period that the most permissive environment for corruption in Kenya’s history was created. (By the end of 2014 the ICC had been tackled to the ground.) This phase was also undergirded by the flaccid narrative that “the president is too rich already to need to steal any more”. However, many of the most egregious scandals ostensibly being investigated today were cooked up then; the government went on a borrowing spree and public officials on a looting one. It was breathtaking—the Standard Gauge Railway, Eurobond and National Youth Service scandals will be the subject of academic scrutiny for many years to come. Ironically, this was also the period during which the president’s penchant for eloquent articulation against corruption was at its peak; it was the age of speeches and plunder. A False Start

During the second phase, 2015 to 2017, and with the ICC cases out of the way, President Kenyatta injected new vigour into the fight against corruption. For the Kenyatta family, the end of the ICC cases also presented an opportunity to disentangle themselves from the increasingly odious partnership with William Ruto and restore relations with the West unencumbered. But while Uhuru desired to burnish his image and keep some of the promises he’d made regarding governance and the fight against corruption, it wasn’t clear how he would effect the grand shift short of physically exterminating his deputy. Still, relations with the West changed for the better and a number of investigative and development agencies from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and other Western nations threw their weight behind the change by providing resources and personnel on the ground.

Ironically, this was also the period during which the president’s penchant for eloquent articulation against corruption was at its peak; it was the age of speeches and plunder

After his State of the Nation address in 2015, Kenyatta presented a “list of shame” to parliament, a lineup of senior officials who were under investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC). While it was a dramatic move and excellent fodder for the press, seasoned investigators were aghast that the head of state had essentially handed over to parliament—in which some of the very officials mentioned in the report sat—a list that was a work-in-progress, an operational report prepared by the EACC. The EACC’s reputation has never really recovered from the effects of Uhuru’s action and although some senior officials did “step aside to facilitate investigations”, no successful prosecutions ever resulted from these investigations. Four months later, in a sign of the dramatic thawing of relations with the West, former President Obama visited Kenya and signed with Kenyatta a unique document of cooperation around the issue of corruption. In the meantime, the opposition was having a field day with all the scandals emanating from within the Jubilee government.

For some, the 2015 “list of shame” was the beginning of a determined weaponisation of the fight against corruption in Kenya, with the President’s aides using it to take on the Deputy President in increasingly direct attacks while the two sides continued to smile politically for the cameras. These new efforts failed to capture the public imagination although the narrative that “William S. Ruto is Kenya’s corruption problem” was touted with great conviction and energy by the president’s allies. However, it quickly became clear that in matters of public accountability at the elite level, William Ruto wields veto power over many of the government’s efforts in this area. By 2016, preparations for the 2017 general election were well underway and the anti-corruption drive was put on the back burner.

The Legacy Crusade

Following the shambolic 2017 election process that saw Kenyatta and Ruto re-elected but dramatically delegitimised politically, the president changed tack. In this third phase, the war against corruption was reinvigorated and the targeting of the deputy president and his allies became far more vigorous. A multi-agency anti-corruption team headed by the Attorney General and reporting directly to the president was set up and critical new appointments were made, with Noordin Haji named to head the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), while George Kinoti was put in charge of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). The EACC seemed to have lost the president’s favour after the “list of shame” blunder and the Attorney General, the head of the DPP and the DCI boss were now the energetic new anti-corruption triumvirate. At the start of 2018 the President orchestrated a political peace treaty—dubbed the handshake—with his political arch-rival Raila Odinga. This consequential but not clearly articulated move had an immediate effect: it demobilised the opposition and brought another energetic ally on- board the Kenyatta family’s attempts to redeem its legacy and deal with William Ruto. It split Jubilee down the middle, with those backing Kenyatta baptised Kieleweke and those behind Ruto nicknamed Tanga Tanga. The handshake, as well as other changes, reinvigorated Kenyatta’s anti-corruption drive which was perceived to be many things at once: an effort to roll back the most corrupt regime in Kenya’s history and redeem some sort of legacy from it for the Kenyatta family while simultaneously isolating William Ruto, constitutionally the best positioned to succeed Kenyatta in the approach to the 2022 elections. Ironically, precisely because the post-2013 looting had been so widespread and so politically “inclusive”, by the beginning of this year, the president himself had in a sense become Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Czar; he had to sit there giving the nod— “prosecute that one, leave out that name, go slow on this one, go after that one”.

Liberal use was made of the media to “expose corruption scandals”. No sooner did one associated with Ruto’s Tanga Tanga camp hit the headlines—such as the Arror-Kimwarer dams scandal—than another associated with Kenyatta’s Kieleweke faction would make the front pages—the Ministry of Health ICU equipment scandal comes to mind. I believe though that this strategy of the heavy use of the media backfired; the scandals spilled out onto the front pages faster than even the government of a developed country could have dealt with. And even with the best will in the world, the multi- agency anti-corruption taskforce lacks the capacity to deal conclusively with even just 10 per cent of the scandals presented to it. For many, this failure has ironically served to confirm suspicions that the entire exercise was nothing but a PR stunt that was from inception programmed to fail. The many massive scandals are now having macroeconomic consequences and have served to increase despondency and anger, particularly among the youth, and as the complaints have intensified, blame has been redirected at the Judiciary, with a vicious whispering campaign deployed against the Chief Justice in particular.

Ironically, precisely because the post-2013 looting had been so widespread and so politically “inclusive”, by the beginning of this year, the president himself had in a sense become Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Czar

Ultimately, it has become clear that the lack of a political strategy has undermined the little credibility the anti-corruption fight enjoyed amongst Kenyans. The police and prosecutors are busier than they’ve ever been but Kenyans don’t seem to believe that the fight is serious. For Kenyatta’s Kieleweke faction, as well as for Odinga, this also fostered the generally hostile response that their handshake initiative—the Building Bridges report—elicited from the public; it was ultimately meant to be an instrument of legitimation and the engineering of a political succession but it has failed in this respect.

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And so, even as the elite compete to “eat”, and no matter the ferocity of this competition, there is an unspoken understanding that they are all ultimately “eating” together. Elements of the elite will compete for particular deals, often using media exposés to claim corruption and the flouting of tendering rules, internal fallouts that are fodder for the media.

There is no distinction between personal commercial interests and the public interest in the conduct of national affairs and I believe this conflict-of-interest gene is deeply embedded in the Kenyatta family DNA. This is the reason why, despite all the hullabaloo about “not stopping the reggae” when bulldozers were knocking down illegally constructed properties in Nairobi, this captivating initiative died a quick death. The failure to distinguish between personal/political and national interests is now popularly referred to as “state capture”, where governance institutions are “repurposed” to serve these personalised interests. In Kenya’s case, however, “state capture” was built into the very design of Imperial British East Africa ((IBEA), the forerunner of what was to become Kenya; the entire political ecosystem is designed to serve the corrupt purposes of the elite.

The many massive scandals are now having macroeconomic consequences and have served to increase despondency and anger, particularly among the youth

It is clear, given Jubilee’s approach since 2013, that managing the Kenyatta succession—fixing an increasingly broken economy, soothing our polarised politics in time for the next general election, dealing with corruption comprehensively enough that Kenyatta can walk into the sunset with something of a legacy—makes for too many governance balls in the air for even the best of political jugglers. Much as Kenyatta is an experienced and skilful political performer, some balls are definitely going to drop.

Interestingly, given the divisions that appeared within the Jubilee alliance almost from the beginning, Kenyatta has been forced to hand over political problems to bureaucrats. (He is most partial to securocrats and intelligence officers.) Moreover, although the BBI initiative emerged out of a handshake between two politicians, as the BBI team set about its work, it became clear that the bureaucrats were managing the process on a day-to-day basis—a reading of the BBI report leaves one with this impression. But the conundrum in our kind of system is that bureaucrats will first act to preserve themselves, especially after all the looting that has happened and which implicates almost every minister and cabinet secretary. As a senior politician explained it to me as he tried to enlighten me on all the infighting and scandals within Jubilee, “The most powerful bureaucrats are doing the scheming for the Kenyatta succession, but bureaucrats are like ticks on a cow’s back—they hang on for dear life even if the cow is nearing its end.”

(Additional research by Salma Mwangola)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By John Githongo

Earlier this week one of Africa’s most tenacious Big Men of the old school was sworn in for a seventh term as President, a victory of his politics of remote control considering his habit of long European sojourns. Paul Biya’s was once said to have asked an official: “Who are you?”

“I’m your minister of agriculture,” the official replied

“Who appointed you and since when?

“You did, sir.”

“Aha, okay. Congratulations.”

Biya, now the elder statesman of France-Afrique, the neo-colonial crony system that has managed France’s former colonial possessions in Africa, oiling the French economy while securing the fortunes of a brutal kleptocracy in Francophone Africa, has run an increasingly fractious and violent Cameroon since 1982. Irked by what he considered an impertinent question by the head of Cameroon Radio & Television, Eric Chinje in 1987, as to what he planned to do about rampant corruption Biya was defensive, dismissive of corruption as a problem in Cameroon. But by 2006, the spotlight was on countries like Cameroon. Irritated in part that Cameroon regularly featured at the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), in 2006 he established operation Sparrow Hawk to root out corruption in the public service.

An initiative of the National Commission for the Fight Against Corruption (CONAC) – Sparrow Hawk has over the years proved one of the most effective tools against Mr. Biya’s political foes. Senior officials are regularly arrested, assets confiscated and generally manhandled by the judiciary – all to little effect as far as the overall problem is concerned. Earlier this year for example there was another scramble by senior officials, and a rash of breathless headlines, after former top officials were arrested and held at the notorious Kodengui prison in Yaounde for mismanagement, corruption and embezzlement. Another 20 officials were restricted from leaving the country. One was arrested in Nigeria by a joint force of Nigerian, Cameroonian and Equatorial Guinean agents. Former Prime Ministers, senior officials at the presidency, the president’s own personal physician and a host of other former ministers have fallen afoul of Operation Sparrow Hawk.

An initiative of the National Commission for the Fight Against Corruption – Sparrow Hawk has over the years proved one of the most effective tool against Mr. Biya’s political foes.

Despite all the drama, Sparrow Hawk doesn’t seem to have dented corruption as an issue in Cameroon. However, it has proved an extremely effective political tool for Paul Biya as he tightens his grip on power in Cameroon from his political engine room at Geneva’s Hotel Intercontinental.

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Kenya is ostensibly in the middle of a major anti-corruption drive. Together with the elite politics of the handshake between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta in March, little else has sold more newspapers in the country besides the murderous proclivities of politicians and socialites. On social media as bulldozers knocked down buildings illegally constructed on road reserves or riparian land, the popular phrase to describe the anti-corruption drive became: ‘No one can stop the reggae’.

The lead vocalist of the reggae was the energetic new Director of Public Prosecutions who has a direct line to the President – Noordin Haji. Unsurprisingly the media have become a key pillar in the latest permutation of the war against corruption – regularly reporting on upcoming arrests, providing prosecutorial details and sometimes seeming to test the waters as to what the public considers credible or perhaps too blatantly politicised. This is not unusual. Any serious anti- corruption drive requires impartial political support. The best mobilisers of this are the media and civil society. For their part this time around, given recent history, civil society has chosen to tread more cautiously. Some foreign embassies and their investigative agencies have become important pillars of some of the key investigations being carried out.

The first phase of the Kenyatta regime’s fight against corruption started in 2015 when the President dropped a bombshell ‘list of shame’ report in parliament during President Kenyatta’s state of the nation address. Included in the list were a number of senior public figures some of whom were forced to resign their positions as the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) investigated an assortment of allegations in their regard:

The ‘list of shame’ didn’t quite cut the mustard with the public partly because of its scale and breadth. This made it difficult to be consumed whole; animating corruption required a ‘political hook’ that the citizenry could use to associate scandals with particular individuals. Throwing in the respected Auditor General’s office that is held in higher esteem than the EACC itself into the list also didn’t help. It also became apparent that the list itself seemed a work-in-progress, an operational report prepared by the EACC and rushed, incomplete, to parliament for the required political optics essential for Mr Kenyatta’s state of the nation address. This tactical blunder of splurging out the incomplete document ultimately worked to the advantage of some of the political players named. They continue in high office to this day.

Within opposition circles and in the Deputy President’s camp of the Jubilee regime the episode was a sort of waterloo for the most powerful official in the EACC – its deputy secretary Michael Mubea, who is seen as the President’s man in the agency. Sources close to the Deputy President William Ruto observed that the Uhuru I ‘list of shame’ anti-corruption move was a stealth attack against many figures associated with the DP, who appeared to have outlived his usefulness to State House once the ICC cases had been dispensed with. Their reading was: why a stealth attack and not a full frontal honest ‘war against corruption’? It seemed to betray anxiety with regard to what the DP’s response would be. This remains the case to this day.

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At the start of this year following the March 9th handshake the reinvigorated Kenyatta II anti- corruption drive was perceived as many things at the same time: an effort to roll back the most corrupt regime in Kenyan history and redeem some sort of legacy from it for the Kenyatta family; and simultaneously, to finally wipe out William Ruto, constitutionally the best positioned successor to Kenyatta as the 2022 elections approach.

If the anti-corruption drive was meant to ‘knock out’ Ruto, the effort is stuck in the mud; the reggae has stopped and bureaucrats are frozen on the dance floor – the courts and front pages of the media. Sources close to the DP explained: “One sees the same stealth attack against the DP as 2015 but executed differently. Last time Michael Mubea and EACC made the grand move but it went the way it went. This time there are three new aspects – first is the centrality of Haji the DPP; second, is the way technology has been deployed – tracking people using their phones and computers and using this telephone traffic for locational data to reverse-engineer evidence for prosecution processes that have already been embarked upon. This has removed the need for warrants. Thirdly, there is a growing sense that the high premium causalities of this phase of the war against corruption hail from a certain [read: Kalenjin] community. This in turn feeds a certain potentially troublesome narrative at the national level.”

There is a growing sense that the high premium causalities of this phase of the war against corruption hail from a certain [read: Kalenjin] community.

Other sources observed: “Clearly [the anti-corruption gig] isn’t going according to plan. When prosecutorial decisions are made from a purely political perspective they don’t tend to work and are more susceptible to an effective political response. It causes things to look and feel, as they did around the ICC matter. There isn’t a strategy being rolled out here. A prosecutorial strategy, for example, needs to be rational but here State House is deciding on guilt and the DPP is working backwards to put together the evidence when prosecutions have already started, all the while using the media as a tool to test what’s politically saleable and lay the ground for future actions.”

This Uhuru II fight against corruption revolves on an axis whose centre is Noordin Haji, the energetic DPP, with the EACC rushing up from behind to remain relevant. The media-cum- prosecution-led strategy – what has come to be called ‘the reggae’ – splutters to life roughly once a week. Beginning to exhibit symptoms of the discredited Cameroonian decade-old Operation Sparrow Hawk, the process has meant attempting to fry big fish in a ‘shock and awe’ tactic that has played extremely well in the media. The biggest fish thus far has been Evans Kidero, former Governor of Nairobi who has found himself in the dock on a range of charges several times. Indeed, he has almost become the big fish that’s being refried every few weeks when public attention wanes. This week fried in oil; two weeks later in court to be fried with onions; two weeks later with garlic and dhania, as the charges are constructed on an ongoing basis. Meanwhile the fight against corruption seems to have gained more traction within elements of the international community than among Kenyans at large. Others contend that anti-corruption has been weaponised politically as part of the process of managing the political transition that’s underway.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo In the middle of this month, a very Kenyan scandal erupted in our parliament. This followed a round of accusations regarding an investigation by the Trade, Industry and Cooperatives Committee of the House into the controversial importation of thousands of tonnes of raw sugar allegedly adulterated with heavy metals by individuals themselves allegedly associated with figures around the president, his family and other top officials. The committee produced a report into the scandal implicating a cross-section of senior officials only for the very same parliament to reject the document. It emerged that MPs had been bribed for sums as little as KSh 10,000 (US$100) for their votes. An investigation is supposedly now underway, ordered by the Speaker, Justin Muturi – in other words, there is an investigation of the scandal of the investigation of a scandal.

While there is general skepticism about these kinds of inquiries ever leading to any real censure of our politicians, the scandal about a scandal was illustrative of something more significant to me. In the months since the Kenyatta-Odinga ceasefire deal, the so-called handshake, Uhuru Kenyatta has been on an anti-corruption crusade that has seen senior officials hauled before court; lifestyle audits embarked upon; and illegally constructed buildings demolished. The administration plays its bells and whistles, and new words du jour – ‘riparian’ land is duly noted – are peddled to exhibit the regime’s utter sincerity in this latest anti-corruption onslaught. The logic here appears to be that Mr Kenyatta is trying to put the corruption genie back into the bottle, manage his own political succession and establish a real legacy all at the same time.

Attempting to do this all at once has meant the anti-corruption crusade is even more political than these things usually are in developing countries. Indeed, in terms of grand optics this latest escapade appears maxed out with the arrest of a ‘big fish’, Evans Kidero, the former governor of Nairobi, and the made-for-TV demolitions of illegally constructed buildings. In terms of Kenya’s political progression, the ultimate candidate for arrest vis-à-vis corruption would be Deputy President, William Ruto and his cohorts. ‘Stopping Bill’, as I have argued before is first and foremost a political project with anti-corruption accompaniments.

The politics of anti-corruption was on display last week with the publication of a curious survey by Ipsos Synovate that asked who Kenyans thought were the most corrupt living politicians. The ‘winners’ were the Deputy President William Ruto and Kirinyaga Governor, Anne Waiguru, the former cabinet secretary in the scandal-ridden ministry of devolution. Both of them immediately cried foul and protested that their political enemies were targeting them to undermine their political ambitions.

Indeed, one of Mr Kenyatta’s more breathtaking achievements has been to distance himself from his own deputy and presumptive successor without openly coming out and saying so. This has been particularly confusing to the President’s largely Kikuyu ethnic base that has spent the past five years defending the President and his deputy as a collective. Among the more notable epiphanies among Jubilee’s Mt Kenya supporters is their sudden discovery of how evil Mr. Ruto is; it was quite the opposite a year ago when he was steering Jubilee’s election campaign. Thus is Kenya’s cynical brand of politics though. Outside his core Kalenjin constituency, only the mainstream churches, to whom Mr. Ruto has become an important patron, have remained steadfast in his implicit defense. But I digress.

The scandal in parliament served as a reminder that all corruption investigations, especially when they are a political response to public outrage or external pressure, specifically target key governance institutions. People around President Moi corruptly extracted 10 percent of GDP from the economy in the run up to the 1992 elections and after. Goldenberg brought the economy to its knees. It forced the Moi regime in 1993 to cave in to the Bretton Woods-inspired SAP austerity programme. Inflation skyrocketed, interest rates went through the roof, millions of Kenyans were impoverished as the cost of living ground them down, but the new air of political freedom seemed to assuage some of the pain. Now we could complain without being immediately locked up.

As part of the deal with the West, and also as a strategy manage public outrage about Goldenberg, the most convoluted and ineffective investigations and prosecutions of any scandal in Kenyan history were launched. Figures like Kamlesh Pattni, the late Wilfred Koinange, a former Treasury Permanent Secretary among others were regularly hauled before the courts as part of the wider Goldenberg prosecutions. By 2002 when the KANU regime was removed from power there were so many Goldenberg-related cases before the courts that no single government official could count them. They were all halted when Kibaki took office, and a Commission of Inquiry established. Despite it handing over its report in 2006 there has never been real accountability for Goldenberg and the over US$1 billion that was raided from the coffers.

Among the more notable epiphanies among Jubilee’s Mt Kenya supporters is their sudden discovery of how evil Mr. Ruto is; it was quite the opposite a year ago when he was steering Jubilee’s election campaign. Thus is Kenya’s cynical brand of politics. Outside his core Kalenjin constituency, only the mainstream churches, to whom Mr. Ruto has become an important patron, have remained steadfast in his implicit defense.

What the Goldenberg scandal demonstrated most starkly was the impact of these mega scandals on governance institutions, perpetrated by the same elite purporting to investigate them. No other scandal had damaged the credibility and public image of the judiciary more severely than Goldenberg. It was clear early on that huge sums of money flooded court corridors and totally paralysed that institution’s capacity to be even remotely effective in regard to land grabbing and general corruption matters. A slow and painful recovery process followed this shredding of the Judiciary. As part of this, a Judicial Service Commission was established in 2010 after the August promulgation of the new constitution to vet judges and revive the independence of the judiciary.

Source: Ipsos Kenya SPEC Barometer 2nd QTR 2018

The scandal-within-a-scandal regarding the dodgy sugar imports earlier this year can be seen in this light. This time around, it is the Legislature that is being targeted. Last week the Public Service Commission explained that it had halted the process of civil servants declaring their wealth citing the need for further clarification on process issues

Over the past few weeks, the greatest excitement in the anti-corruption fight was generated by the demolitions of properties illegally constructed on road reserves and riparian land. Over the past five years, about US$4 billion stolen from the economy has been laundered mostly through a real estate boom that has transformed Nairobi’s skyline and cities and towns across the country. The chilling effect and blow-back from this particular dimension of the anti-corruption campaign is difficult to exaggerate. Typically, millions of corrupt dollars is deployed as hush-money into parliament, the judiciary, investigating agencies, civil service and the media. A deliberate leak of a telephone conversation and between the governors of Nairobi, Mike Mbuvi Sonko, and Kiambu, Ferdinand Waititu, revealed what most of us have suspected – that the anti-corruption fight is politically choreographed. This calls into question its sincerity. It also tells us that the corruption of our governance bodies will likely be accelerated precisely to cover its tracks. Scandals within scandals.

**** I continue to be persuaded that the current fight against corruption is also aimed at rebooting Mr. Kenyatta’s legacy and that of his family in the light of the fiscal bind his regime finds itself in following five years of unprecedented profligacy and theft. The government is preparing to introduce a 16 percent across-the-board VAT tax on petroleum products in addition to levies already introduced that have raised the cost of living for ordinary Kenyans. It is clear that the Jubilee regime is in the middle of what can only be described as an IMF structural adjustment programme, Version 2.0.

A deliberate leak of a telephone conversation between the governors of Nairobi, Mike Mbuvi Sonko, and Kiambu, Ferdinand Waititu, revealed what most of us have suspected – that the anti-corruption fight is politically choreographed. This calls into question its sincerity. It also tells us that the corruption of our governance bodies will likely be accelerated precisely to cover its tracks. Scandals within scandals.

In truth though, this isn’t an IMF programme of the familiar variety from the 1980s and 1990s. Our own greed and incompetence has led us to this point. Indeed, the IMF and World Bank have been accommodating to the point of complicity over the past five years, looking the other way as Kenya’s foreign debt increased by two and a half times from US$9 billion to US$25 billion. As David Ndii argues, the Chinese debt-financed SGR alone accounts for 30 percent of this increase; another 30 percent is by sovereign bonds for which the country has nothing to show. Public debt now stands at KSh 860 billion (US$ 8.6 billion), a staggering 72 percent of the last financial year’s tax receipts.

I continue to be persuaded that the current fight against corruption is also aimed at rebooting Mr. Kenyatta’s legacy and that of his family in the light of the fiscal bind his regime finds itself in following five years of unprecedented profligacy and theft.

Facing insolvency the government has implemented a range of measures including the president halting all new project spending. Last week, the Council of Governors complained that in July the Treasury disbursed nothing to the Counties. Sources: The National Treasury and Central Bank of Kenya

The IMF and World Bank have been accommodating to the point of complicity over the past five years, looking the other way as Kenya’s foreign debt increased by two and a half times from US$9 billion to US$25 billion.

It is on this economic front that the real challenge for Kenya over the coming months lies. It will quickly become a political one as well. Bulldozers knocking down temples are mere distractions in light of this.

Research by Juliet A. Atellah

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By John Githongo

Late last year the country was briefly captivated by an audacious heist by two brothers, Halford Munene Murakaru, 32, and Charles Mwangi Murakaru, 30, and their cousin Julius Ndungu Wainaina, 30, who’d allegedly dug a 30 meter long underground tunnel into the strong room of the Thika town branch of the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB). They then crept in on Sunday the 19th of November and made off with Ksh.52 million (US$520,000). The theft itself was unsurprising to Kenyans. It was the ingenuity and patience behind the tunnel that caught the public imagination. My own attention was piqued by later comments attributed to their father Titus Murakaru Githui, 59, aka Kahiga.

When interviewed about the conduct of his sons he was totally relaxed and unsurprised about it. As unusually frank as his comments were, they contained some wisdom about Kenyan society and attitudes around theft. He reportedly told local dailies that the actions of his sons were part of a wider societal problem. He argued that they had been ‘inspired’ by the current Kenyan condition that sees major scandals such as those that take place at the NYS and Ministry of Health happen and the public officials allegedly involved not only get off scot-free, but are also allowed to prosper as a result. Quite frankly he was not too far off the mark. Last week public consternation lit up social media when the former Managing Director of the scandal-prone Kenya Power company, Ben Chumo, showed up in parliament for vetting by the Finance and Planning Committee, the presidential nominee for chair of the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC). Mr. Chumo is currently in court with other indictees over graft charges involving the alleged theft of KSh 450 million (US$4.5 million) from Kenya Power. He has been photographed smiling broadly from the dock and this apparent lack of any sense of irony or appreciation of the ludicrous contradiction his behaviour implied was apparent during and after he went in for the vetting. Perhaps even more lacking in irony, the Committee rejected Mr. Chumo’s nomination, explaining in deadpan tones: “(Ben Chumo) has integrity issues arising out of the fact that he has been accused of economic crimes and therefore does not satisfy the requirements of Chapter Six of the Constitution on Leadership and Integrity.” (See here)

Chumo has been photographed smiling broadly from the dock and this apparent lack of any sense of irony or appreciation of the ludicrous contradiction his behaviour implied was apparent during and after he went in for the vetting. Perhaps even more lacking in irony, the Committee rejected Mr. Chumo’s nomination, explaining in deadpan tones: “(Ben Chumo) has integrity issues arising out of the fact that he has been accused of economic crimes and therefore does not satisfy the requirements of Chapter Six of the Constitution on Leadership and Integrity.”

A supremely ironic twist because it was parliament in August 2012 that approved the Leadership and Integrity Act and then proceeded to mangle and water down Chapter Six of the Constitution while purporting to operationalise it. The legislative hollowing out of Chapter Six has continued apace over the last six years. It would be unsurprising, in these twisted circumstances, if Mr. Chumo challenged the decision of parliament in court.

I would argue that Mr. Chumo would understandably have been quite taken aback by this rejection and the reasons articulated by the Committee for it. His attitude represents a prevalent culture in Kenya especially as regards the public service and theft from the public service. While the government has embarked on an anti-graft drive complete with a series of arrests, vetting procedures, the anticipated introduction of lie detector machines etc, it is clear corruption in Kenya no longer has a technical fix. Indeed, Kenya has among the most sophisticated anti-corruption infrastructure regimes in Sub Saharan Africa. It has even become the subject of study by academics and other anti-corruption experts from around the world. It’s clear that Kenya doesn’t lack institutions, programmes, officials and initiatives to fight corruption; rather, graft has become part of our political, economic and social framework for understanding ourselves as Kenyans. Theft has been normalized and instrumentalised as a tool for maintaining stability of the Kenyan kind, which means sustaining a tiny elite in power. This hasn’t happened by mistake.

It is a deliberate project that feeds into a culture of political cooptation and compromise designed to undermine any elite solidarity around progressive issues: inequality, fighting poverty, protecting the environment, the rights of women, minorities and marginalized groups etc. These strategies of compromise and cooptation have been resilient: in part, their success is derived from changing the very way people understand power, wealth and access to justice; and in turn how these are acquired and perpetuated. One prospers by ‘getting in on the act’; agreeing to ‘play the game’. Entire institutions can be compromised and sometimes the elites of entire tribes. And so it is that a plethora of laws and statutory agencies find themselves helpless against a culture of theft precisely because they are constructed on a moral and cultural foundation that is inimical to their success. Kenya has among the most sophisticated anti-corruption infrastructure regimes in Sub Saharan Africa. It has even become the subject of study by academics and other anti- corruption experts from around the world. It’s clear that Kenya doesn’t lack institutions, programmes, officials and initiatives to fight corruption; rather, graft has become part of our political, economic and social framework for understanding ourselves as Kenyans. Theft has been normalized and instrumentalised as a tool for maintaining stability of the Kenyan kind, which means sustaining a tiny elite in power. This hasn’t happened by mistake.

When the solidarity of progressive forces is undermined society is quietly eaten away from within. Among, the unchallenged continental masters of these cynical approaches to governance have included figures like the late Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo); Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and our own Professor of Politics Daniel T. arap Moi.

Mobutu’s relationship with his one-time minister and then political opponent Jean Nguza Karl-i- Bond, nephew of the Katangan secessionist leader, Moise Tshombe, was profoundly illustrative of this approach. Karl-i-Bond served as minister in Mobutu’s regime, then fell out, made up and fell out again. Bond agreed to serve as Mobutu’s Prime Minister in the 1990s even after torture by Mobutu’s agents had left him impotent in 1977 when, regarded as a possible Mobutu heir-apparent, the Guide turned against Nguza and publicly accused the PM of attempting to seduce his wife.

When the solidarity of progressive forces is undermined society is quietly eaten away from within.

Such are the politics of personal rule.

As Zimbabwe comes out of its first post-Mugabe election, a major challenge facing the country shall be how delicately the incoming administration will manage the land issue in the country. When Robert Mugabe lost a constitutional referendum that shredded his legitimacy in 2000, he became a victim of his own ruthless machinations. Led by Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi, the war veterans leveraged authentic grievances to force a massive pay-off from the Mugabe regime and a land redistribution programme which marked the beginning of the end for Zimbabwe’s economy.

******

Allow me to illustrate Kenya’s case.

I remember a story related to me by a top academic and friend of a trip he made to visit former President Moi one Sunday morning in the 1990s. A peer of his at the university hurriedly arranged the trip. A couple of university vehicles had been rustled up to pick up a largish group of academics all of whom hailed from his ethnic group. This is an important fact, as was to later become apparent. The group was more than peers; they were friends who attended the baptisms, weddings and funerals of family members. They were also part of an intellectual cadre – a group who thought a particular way about Kenya, what it was and where it was going. They were big brains, influential and some of them often critical and questioning of the then stifling status quo under a one-party authoritarian regime. By late morning the three vehicles full of professors, some with their spouses, were headed to the country retreat of the President 100 or so kilometres out of the capital in the scenic Rift Valley.

Though questions were asked about the purpose to which they had been summoned at such short notice, Presidential summonses sufficed as an explanation in and of themselves. On reaching the Rift Valley town the group was first delivered without ceremony to a church. They were directed to pews and handed hymnbooks. Shortly, and again without prior announcement the head of state arrived with his entourage and they took their place at the front. Mass started. My friend and his fellow professors sang along to the hymns. At the end of mass, again without much being said, the entire group was delivered to the Presidential residence nearby for lunch. The meal was served on a long table and the group had been joined by a large collection of senior officials from various departments for what turned out to be a sumptuous meal. Again nothing was said to the academics who found themselves by other high officials enjoying the lunch and making small talk. It was only after lunch when they were directed to a red-carpeted waiting room that some began to ask, “What’s going on here exactly?”. Their colleague who had engineered the entire visit that morning urged patience. Before long they were summoned into a wood-panelled office where they found the President in relaxed spirits. He greeted them all graciously and then proceeded to lecture them on the singular responsibility that fell on their shoulders as the moulders of the country’s university students who were the nation’s future leaders.

At the end of this speech, without responses being sought the head state informed them that he intended to reimburse them for the travel and trouble that Sunday. He pulled out a bag and gave each of the male professors, say, US$1,000. They all respectfully and thankfully accepted his handout. Then, abruptly as if he had not realized some of them had come to with their spouses he exclaimed, “Oh, you have some of your Mamas here too?” He then proceeded to give each of the women $500 and they grovelled appropriately in gratitude. Then in a final gesture the head of state gave $5,000 to the professor who had rustled up the others and told them, “you go and divide that among yourselves.”

The group retreated to a nearby hotel to discuss the day’s events and share out the $5,000. Things went wrong when two things happened. First, one of the academics who had been unable to travel with his wife because she’d been at church when the van came to pick him up protested. “Why wasn’t I told to come with my wife? If I had come with her I would have $1,500 now! So compensate me for the difference from the $5,000!” My friend made things worse complaining with disgust, “This whole experience was a violation of us! We are individuals with our dignity not to be brought out here for handouts!” He put his $1,000 on the table. Silent confusion reigned. Eventually the group made it back to the capital.

At the end of this speech, without responses being sought the head state informed them that he intended to reimburse them for the travel and trouble that Sunday. He pulled out a bag and gave each of the male professors US$1,000. They all respectfully and thankfully accepted his handout. Then, abruptly as if he had not realized some of them had come to with their spouses he exclaimed, “Oh, you have some of your Mamas here too?” He then proceeded to give each of the women $500 and they grovelled appropriately in gratitude.

It is not clear if the outstanding issues that were raised were ever resolved but something more important had happened. This group of top academics and peers from the same ethnic group; men who in the past were comrades, birds of a feather – they were never the same again. The State House handout and the divisive responses it led to shattered a fundamental and implicit trust that had existed before they met the president. The handout had worked. If that group of ‘radical’ Professors from that tribe had ever harboured any thoughts of political activity that may have undermined the president then their capacity to organise for it had been broken for good. Untangling this vicious cultural web can’t be done by an agency or a few laws. It requires political creativity and authenticity on a scale only glimpsed thrice in Kenyan history: briefly at independence; briefly again in 1991 when Section 2A of the constitution was repealed; and, in 2003 when the KANU regime was removed from office by the NARC coalition. It is just such a transformative moment that needs to be conjured up in Kenya now for the culture of theft and plunder to be halted.

(Research by Juliet Atellah)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo In September last year, the Tunisian parliament approved a law granting amnesty to officials accused of corruption during the rule of dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. This immediately triggered protests. Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Tunisia has been hailed as a democratic success in the Middle East. Unlike many of the other countries where the democratic convulsions of 2011 were quickly smothered or descended into chaos, Tunisia’s democratic experiment has perhaps not flourished but neither is in critical condition. In July 2013 Russia’s lower house of parliament approved an amnesty for thousands of entrepreneurs jailed for economic crimes. It was argued that the criminalisation of business disputes in Russia had had a deleterious effect on the commercial climate generally. In June 2015 the Indonesian Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro announced an initiative aimed at boosting tax incomes by introducing an amnesty for past economic crimes that would allow billions of dollars parked abroad by Indonesians to be returned to the country. President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s government was in a crunch. They had embarked on a series of expensive infrastructure projects but needed to bump up tax revenues by 30 percent to fund them.

Amnesty programmes always imply pragmatic choices seen as disproportionately benefiting elites that have benefitted from corruption in the past. For the independent media and civil society, the concern is always one of entrenching impunity with regard to economic crimes. Where impunity attends to economic crimes it is always accompanied by similar official attitudes to sometimes the most egregious human rights abuses.

The Finance Bill, 2018 published with the budget last month, included an amendment to the Tax Procedures Act, 2015, suggesting that Kenya may have quietly chosen to go in a direction similar to Indonesia’s. Though the rationale of the action here has yet to be publicly articulated like similar initiatives in other parts of the world, the new amendment changes the tax amnesty that was declared three years ago. It has been expanded to include undeclared income to the extent that: “The funds transferred under the amnesty shall be exempt from the provisions of Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2009 or any other Act relating to reporting and investigation of financial transactions, to the extent of the source of the funds excluding funds derived from proceeds of terrorism, poaching and drug trafficking.” Amnesty programmes always imply pragmatic choices seen as disproportionately benefiting elites that have benefited from corruption in the past. For the independent media and civil society the concern is always one of entrenching impunity with regard to economic crimes. Where impunity attends to economic crimes it is always accompanied by similar official attitudes to sometimes the most egregious human rights abuses.

The new amendment changes the tax amnesty that was declared three years ago. It has been expanded to include undeclared income to the extent that: “The funds transferred under the amnesty shall be exempt from the provisions of Proceeds of Crime and Anti- Money Laundering Act, 2009 or any other Act relating to reporting and investigation of financial transactions, to the extent of the source of the funds excluding funds derived from proceeds of terrorism, poaching and drug trafficking.

Money has no loyalty and in this globalised era, wears the uniform or label of no country. It doesn’t announce itself as in, “I am being laundered”; or, “This is terrorism finance or the proceeds of poaching.” The rigour and integrity of the oversight mechanisms meant to check these flows needs to be world class. And even world class anti-money laundering mechanisms in the world’s most developed economies with the best resourced investigative authorities have only made a small dent on the giant global flows of illicit wealth around the globe over the last two decades. Typically, drug dealers, money launderers and globalised criminal enterprises are better resourced and more ruthlessly managed than even the best policing institutions in the world.

Kenya’s recent changes, combined with currently advanced plans to turn Kenya into an international finance center – a tax haven, essentially – could herald the end of the war against corruption in Kenya as we know it. All while we are distracted by the exciting scandals being reported on in the media. The reality of what’s playing out remains to be seen but it should be of some concern that one of the most corrupt yet sophisticated financial sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa is about to open itself up in a structured legalised manner to the darkest element of the global financial system.

Kenya’s dalliance with amnesties for past economic crimes is not new. As the end of the Moi era drew closer, I was involved in a national debate regarding what we would do with past economic crimes when a new administration came to power after the December 2002 elections. In 2000 and 2001, Transparency International-Kenya, the National Council of Churches of Kenya and the Law Society of Kenya among others convened a series of debates on the subject. The rationale at the time was that, first Kenya’s public service culture had been ruined by rampant theft and plunder especially since the 1972 Ndegwa Commission Report which legalised conflict of interest. Changing this culture meant having a structured national approach to dealing with past corruption. An option was to articulate an amnesty mechanism accompanied by a restitution programme that would allow the return of corruptly acquired wealth and a lustration initiative that would forever bar those who were granted the amnesty from ever holding public office in Kenya. The Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land of 2003 (aka the Ndung’u Commission) came out of this thinking, as did efforts to trace wealth stashed illegally overseas by Kenyans.

A second strand of reasoning at the time was that the opposition, which seemed likely to win the election, would be coming into office broke after over a decade of expensive campaigning, and would be confronted by a Moi-era political and bureaucratic elite opposed to progressive reform and possessed of the kind of wealth to cause a huge amount of political trouble; indeed with the capacity to stymie real reform altogether. The thinking was that this wealth needed to be squeezed out of our politics to allow a new administration the space to implement far reaching reforms aimed at improving the welfare of Kenyans generally and transforming the economy, society and politics.

The Kibaki era initiative faltered when the elite around him led by some of his key ministers decided to make private deals with the very thieves their own administration was ostensibly chasing down. It got so bad at one point that some officials were using the anti-corruption campaign as a highly lucrative extortion tool. Well-heeled players from the past coughed up the equivalent of billions of shillings in cash, forex, land, real estate, company shares and other considerations in exchange for essentially bringing the anti-corruption campaign to a halt and turning it into a PR gimmick to placate wananchi.

When one looks around the world since the early 1990s, amnesty initiatives for economic crimes – especially in countries where corruption is systemic – have largely been failures. They succeed in facilitating the repatriation of some hot money that causes bumps in stock markets, hikes real estate prices and strengthens local currencies in the short term. In the medium term they seem to send a message that theft works and therefore serve to entrench impunity especially with regard to economic crimes. In the developing world their limited successes seem to apply only during the first 18 months of a popular regime elected on an anti-corruption ticket.

The Kibaki era corruption amnesty initiative faltered when the elite around him led by some of his key ministers decided to make private deals with the very thieves their own administration was ostensibly chasing down… At one point, some officials were using the anti-corruption campaign as a highly lucrative extortion tool. Well-heeled players from the past coughed up billions of shillings in cash, forex, land, real estate, company shares and other considerations in exchange for essentially bringing the anti-corruption campaign to a halt and turning it into a PR gimmick to placate wananchi.

It is also the case that typically these amnesty initiatives are implemented only in the most corrupt countries where the context makes for the greatest challenges. This, as I have noted earlier, doesn’t always apply when accompanied by tectonic political changes, notably as the ones we are witnessing in Malaysia today.

Additionally, it is often the case that amnesty programmes are often desperate measures aimed at dealing with the fiscal distress of corrupt regimes. In this sense they can also be deeply cynical ploys to launder the ill-gotten gains of the past and concurrently wave the white flag for a political elite that has given up the fight against systemic corruption in public life.

As I observed above, as an instrument aimed at dealing with a widespread culture of theft and plunder the issue of an amnesty for economic crimes has bubbled up several times over the last two- decades in Kenya. In 2007 the KACC complained about amendments the legislature had introduced to the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, 2003 following the Anglo Leasing scandal. In a statement issued in September 2007 the then head of the Commission, Justice Aaron Ringera argued that parliament had essentially granted ‘a blanket amnesty’ for economic crimes committed before the 2nd of May 2003. More recently, the NCCK’s leadership, confronted with the current explosion of corruption scandals in the media called for a one-year amnesty for past corruption after which all future graft would be punished ruthlessly. The NCCK has been one of the most consistent actors in this debate for almost two decades now. The former head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Wabukala is chair of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and was party to the statement made by the NCCK in May.

In 2007 the KACC complained about amendments the legislature had introduced to the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, 2003 following the Anglo Leasing scandal. In a statement issued in September 2007 the then head of the Commission, Justice Aaron Ringera argued that parliament had essentially granted ‘a blanket amnesty’ for economic crimes committed before the 2nd of May 2003. More recently, the NCCK’s leadership, confronted with the current explosion of corruption scandals in the media called for a one-year amnesty for past corruption after which all future graft would be punished ruthlessly.

The amendments to the Tax Procedures Act 2015 may indicate that the Jubilee regime appears to have cynically heeded the NCCK’s call. Either that or the extent of the regime’s fiscal distress as it implements an IMF sanctioned austerity programme is such that they have resorted to extraordinary measures to find the money to keep government going and the elite with their snouts in the trough. I argued last month that in Kenya, the real corruption is not in the scandals that are tantalising us in the media but in the budget.

(Research by Juliet A. Atellah) Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo

The three key issues Kenyans are talking about today when they survey the political scene are corruption; ‘the handshake’ between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta; and, the fate of Deputy President William Ruto as he prepares for a run at the presidency in 2022. For his part, Mr. Kenyatta came out of the handshake in March with a renewed push against the theft and plunder that has characterised his regime thus far. He has issued strong statements against corruption; announced that procurement officers would be asked to step aside and vetted before resuming their positions. Previously he’d even announced that lie detector machines would be introduced into the public service to promote integrity. Most recently, he pronounced public officials (starting with himself) would be subjected to lifestyle audits and that all major public procurements would see their details published in the media including the names of the companies winning the tenders complete with their beneficial owners. All strong stuff especially coming on the back of a series of breathless exposés in the mainstream press of the looting of a range of government bodies, the National Youth Service (NYS) merely being the most egregious and colourful. The scandals have exasperated Kenyans.

Oddly though, all the bold pronouncements are yet to capture the public imagination. Indeed, Kenyans seem sceptical about the President’s anti-corruption crusade. This is partly because he has historically been big on talk and small on action where this particular vice is concerned. Secondly, there is suspicion regarding its timing. Why do now what you were unwilling to do between 2013 and 2017? Thirdly, there is the rather scattershot character of the anti-corruption initiatives announced. This has led some to observe that a series of tactical moves are being employed without a coherent strategy. For example, it is self-defeating to attempt a serious anti-corruption campaign in a society as open as Kenya’s while alienating the media and civil society at the same time. Public opinion is mobilised by civil society, civic society (the churches, professions etc) and the media – not by politicians no matter how well-meaning.

This is partly because Kenyatta has historically been big on talk and small on action where this particular vice is concerned…There is suspicion regarding the timing of the latest war on corruption. Why do now what you were unwilling to do between 2013 and 2017?

The broad scepticism that has greeted Kenyatta’s efforts thus far was best articulated by one of the country’s most experienced progressive politicians, Senator Jim Orengo of Ugenya, speaking before the Senate on May 31st. He warned that the real corruption in Kenya was happening at the highest levels but we Kenyans were afraid to call it out. He essentially asked the president and other top leaders to look around themselves and they would find that the real rot sits in cabinet with them: “In the inner sanctum of power there are people sitting there who should not be sitting there.”

The truth of the matter is that 50 percent of the fight against corruption is related to perceptions. Despite extraordinary efforts to manage the media, the current campaign is yet to capture the public imagination. Until it does Mr. Kenyatta is rolling a stone uphill watched by a disbelieving population. As I said, part of the problem is that it’s clear he doesn’t have a coherent strategy, which makes even simple efforts all the more difficult. Secondly, Kenyatta and his colleagues are victims of an even more serious strategic misinterpretation.

Corruption in Kenya isn’t about greedy procurement officers, fiddling civil servants, crooked businessmen, shady bankers, thieving politicians. These are creatures found in all societies. The issue at hand in the Kenyan context is that 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. Indeed, if one were looking at where the next scandals will come from one doesn’t need an army of technicians with polygraph machines. This week the Cabinet Secretary for Finance presented to parliament a Ksh.2.5 Trillion (US$25 billion) budget. The thieving in Kenya starts right here. It is built into the budget. When the budget of the NYS shot up from US$50 million to US$250 million in Jubilee’s last term it was clear that this wasn’t a measure of the NYS’s absorptive capacity or a vast upgrading of this programme but the creation of what was literally a slush fund created to be stolen. This ‘theft-ready’ budget is a product of our politics. Last week the Auditor General, Edward Ouko, told Reuters that corruption across all levels of government threatens the integrity and basic functioning of the state. He said that the corruption was ‘coordinated at a high level’. This week the Cabinet Secretary for Finance presented to parliament a Ksh.2.5 Trillion (US$25 billion) budget. The thieving in Kenya starts right here. It is built into the budget. When the budget of the NYS shot up from US$50 million to US$250 million in Jubilee’s last term it was clear that this wasn’t a measure of the NYS’s absorptive capacity or a vast upgrading of this programme, but the creation of what was literally a slush fund created to be stolen. This ‘theft-ready’ budget is a product of our politics.

It is time to accept that Kenya’s corruption crisis may in part be caused by the deliberate collapsing of our public finance management system – chunks of it are owned by what have come to be known as ‘cartels’. When this happens the challenge you face is not chasing bribe-soliciting cops on the beat but fixing a situation where the budget itself is the corruption. There are generally three types of corruption: petty corruption that is often extortion by public officials for small considerations to overlook minor infractions or expedite the delivery of services already paid for in your taxes. Grand corruption that typically involves senior officials conspiring with private sector players to skim off public works projects of one kind or the other. There is a third type of ‘corruption’ that I call looting or economic delinquency on the part of the elite. In this type of thieving the pretence of a project to skim off is set aside as elites raid public coffers with impunity and pocket billions. This causes the kind of macroeconomic effects we are seeing in Kenya as our foreign debt soars on account of the looting of a small elite.

*******

In 1998 the fight against corruption, which had been a global advocacy campaign since the early 1990s by organisations like Transparency International, entered the mainstream of the global development agenda. There was no development programme in any developing country that didn’t have an anti-corruption aspect; that didn’t say something about transparency, accountability, basic freedoms etc. Even the World Bank whose legal department had previously blocked its officials from mentioning ‘corruption’ broke with tradition and joined the bandwagon. Previously corruption was described as project ‘leakages’ and ‘slippages’.

What had actually happened is that with the fall of the Berlin wall the opening up of political space meant that corruption, bribery and other forms of skulduggery that had been essential to governance during the Cold War found themselves being reported in newly free media, by a public free to associate and speak their minds. Between 1998 and 2008 a series of corruption scandals shook governments across the world. From Kenya to Germany, Peru, South Korea etc. In Latin America alone between 1998 and 2008, 11 governments fell due to corruption scandals that morphed into political crises of one sort or the other. By the start of this century anti-corruption researchers such as the respected Chilean economist Dani Kauffmann (now of the Natural Resource Governance Institute), argued to Moises Naim in Foreign Policy that with regard to the fight against corruption “Much was done, but not much was accomplished. What we are doing is not working.”

Indeed, corruption was increasingly blamed for all societal ills. More recently we’ve seen corruption scandals cause political shakeups in India, Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Thailand, Guatemala, South Koreas etc. In Kenya we face a crisis in the health and education sectors; we are unable to create jobs for a majority of our youth. Unsurprisingly, corruption is the easiest to blame for what are sometimes failures caused by incompetence, a lack of capacity and the inability of the ruling elite to define the national interest separate from their own commercial interests.

Between 1998 and 2008 a series of corruption scandals shook governments across the world. From Kenya to Germany, Peru, South Korea etc. In Latin America alone between 1998 and 2008, 11 governments fell due to corruption scandals that morphed into political crises of one sort of the other. By the start of this century anti-corruption researchers…argued…that with regard to the fight against corruption: “Much was done, but not much was accomplished. What we are doing is not working”.

In Kenya, a serious effort to delineate personal interests from national ones would go a long way to dealing with our corruption problem. Conflict of interest was entrenched in our public service by the infamous Ndegwa Commission report of 1972 and we’ve been paying for it ever since. Most recently it is the poor who are paying most for it. The budget this week saw a cash-strapped regime under the gun of the IMF increase taxes on basic commodities in part to pay for the cynical profligacy of the elite since 2013. Ironically, Kenya’s constitution has created a legal infrastructure that should make the kind of economic delinquency and looting that’s in evidence impossible. But breathing life into a constitution requires political will that still seems to be lacking. In the meantime anti- corruption campaigns will be embarked on full of drama, gimmicks, speeches and technical fixes to problems that have much to do with the fact that our elites refuse to let governance institutions work, as they should. As a result, they are struggling to engineer the public sympathy and support essential to make the changes that need to happen.

Research by Juliet A. Attelah

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By John Githongo

“If a man became a habitual thief, he was looked upon as a public danger and was put to death publicly, sometimes by being beaten to death or burnt in the same way as a witch or wizard. In Gikuyu society theft and witchcraft were considered very serious criminal offenses.” – Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya

In 1972 Lt. Col. Mathieu Kérékou became Benin’s head of state through a coup and proceeded to run the country as its ruthless ‘Marxist Leninist/socialist’ dictator until 1990. The small West African nation was the first on the continent to transition to democracy in the ‘wind of change’ that blew across Africa after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Kérékou, popularly known as the ‘Chameleon’ for his capacity for political reinvention, accepted defeat in elections in March 1991 to the Paris- educated ex-Finance Minister and ex-World Bank/IMF official Nicéphore Soglo. Five years later in 1996, in an amazing political rebound, Kérékou defeated Soglo to become the country’s second ever democratically elected head of state.

Kérékou ruled Benin until 2006 and passed away three years ago. His versatility speaks volumes about how Africans regard their leaders. That he was able to unseat Soglo in 1996 was in part a testament to his capacities as a political ‘chameleon’, but also Soglo’s painful economic measures and the corruption that swirled around his generally liberal administration. Africans generally place great currency on leaders who demonstrate often-contradictory qualities: at once firm but also humble, for example. That said there is no type of leader that is given greater leeway by Africans than the one who is not only not a thief but one whose family members as well are not perceived to be thieves. The legacies of clean men are far more resilient in the African collective memory than those of strong leaders, clever ones, those who are good managers, those who implement giant programmes, etc. It is thus that Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere’s memory remains hallowed. Much like that of Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. Similar underlying sentiments and attitudes saw Muhammadu Buhari elected President of Nigeria in 2015. He was an aging former military dictator who’d ruled for a short time (31st December 1983 to 27th August 1985) with painful paternalistic firmness, but, unlike almost all his predecessors Buhari had and has retained one critical quality – he and his family are not perceived to be thieves.

There is no type of leader that is given greater leeway by Africans than the one who is not only not a thief but one whose family members are not perceived to be thieves. The legacies of clean men are far more resilient among Africans than those of strong leaders, clever ones, those who are good managers who implement giant programmes, etc. It is thus that Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere’s memory remains hallowed. Much like that of Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso.

When Kérékou realised his game was up during a National Conference in 1990 he orchestrated a brilliant piece of political theatre. In a nationally televised event he spoke to the Archbishop of Cotonou, Isidore de Souza, confessed his guilt and begged for forgiveness for the excesses of his regime since 1972. When he lost the election in March the following year he retired to his village, became a born-again Christian and lived a humble, quiet life. All of this resonated with the Beninese people profoundly enough that he was able to emerge out of his village in the north to unseat Soglo in 1996.

*****

On the 2nd of May, during his state of the nation address to parliament, President Uhuru Kenyatta asked for the forgiveness of Kenyans for anything he may have done or said anything to undermine the unity of Kenyans especially during the divisive election of 2017. Kenyatta had made a similar apology for KANU’s excesses in September 2004. This time the apology followed a ‘handshake’ political ceasefire with Raila Odinga on the 9th of March that has set in motion political realignments that seem to grow in scale with each passing week.

Kenyatta started his final term as president pronouncing that his regime would focus on four priority areas; a ‘Big Four Agenda’: affordable healthcare; affordable housing; food security and manufacturing. As the month of May drew to an end I’m pretty confident that, if asked to name the four pillars of the Big Four Agenda, a vast majority of Kenyans would be unable to do so. The cost of living and more importantly theft and plunder are the issues that have seized the public imagination. This is partly as a result of the fact that between 2013 and 2017 the Jubilee regime has emerged as the most scandal-prone and corrupt in Kenyan history. The list of dodgy projects and scams has grown steadily over the last almost six years. Early in 2013, there was a scandal surrounding the renting of an aircraft for Deputy President William Ruto that allegedly cost Kenyans US$1 million or thereabouts. This was followed by a series of other scandals involving the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, Office of the President and institutions such as the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB), National Youth Service (NYS), Kenya Power, Kenya Airports Authority (KAA), the National Youth Fund, the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), police, railways among others. Up to US$3.5 billion is estimated to have gone walkabout.

I’m pretty confident that, if asked to name the four pillars of the Big Four Agenda, a vast majority of Kenyans would not be able to do so. The cost of living and more importantly theft and plunder are the issues that have seized the public imagination. This is partly as a result of the fact that between 2013 and 2017 the Jubilee regime has emerged as the most scandal prone and corrupt in Kenyan history.

A couple of weeks ago another series of mega scams hit the front page of the national newspapers. The institutions implicated in the latest swath of exposés were more or less the same ones as those reported between 2013 and 2015. Speaking to the private sector at one of their meetings even President Kenyatta admitted that his Big Four agenda didn’t stand a chance given the manifestly rampant levels of corruption. The National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) chimed in admitting that we are living under Kenya’s most corrupt regime and even somewhat surprisingly the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) spoke forthrightly in this regard as well.

Through most of May a series of exposés have been covered by the media in such titillating detail that it has caused observers to point out two things: first, its clear that the information about the scams is leaked from within the State itself and not painstaking months of investigations by media houses. This has fuelled speculation that it’s all part of a wider political move. Second, the State’s ostensible outrage and even the President and Deputy President’s promises that this time ‘no stone will be left unturned’ in bringing those behind the scams to book, have been met with considerable public skepticism. This is despite one of the most dramatic police actions against suspects involved in corruption just this past week when tens of bureaucrats and businesspeople were arraigned in court as a result of the latest episode of theft from the NYS. Conspicuously missing were the political actors that shepherd all big scams through the system.

Also of some fascination was the fact that after the March 9th handshake, it is clear that the ‘corruption crisis’ is playing out at a time of political realignments as Kenyatta serves out his last presidential term and his deputy William Ruto ramps up his own political machine to contest the 2022 elections.

Events over the past week, with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations; Attorney General’s office and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions leading the theatrical and highly media-friendly response to the latest ructions, have only served as fodder for those who see the unfolding events as a cynical political play in the familiar Kenyan tradition. As a friend observed to me this week: “This is some cold, cynical Machiavellian sh** taking place right here!”

Another interesting aspect of the latest developments is the fact that the president has clearly passed on the burden of prosecuting the ‘war against corruption’ to a new cast of players who have taken to the stage with unusual enthusiasm. The new boss at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, George Kinoti, has a reputation as a hands-on policeman. Sources who know our leading detective agency point out that in the past Kinoti has led efforts to dismantle groups within the force that had themselves become criminal. The Director of Public Prosecutions was recently appointed direct from the national spy service and he has also adopted an exuberant posture. Kenya has a new Attorney General too, the amiable and plain speaking, Paul Kihara Kariuki, who took the unusual step of essentially taking a demotion from the Court of Appeal where he was a senior judge to become the new AG. This combination has lent new impetus to the anti-corruption drive. Given Kenya’s vexed history though, the scepticism with which these activities is no surprise. Conspicuously absence from this new cast is the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), constitutionally charged with leading the charge against corruption. It is notable that Kenyans have not considered the Commission’s absence worthy of any serious debate.

Sources who know our leading detective agency point out that in the past Kinoti has led efforts to dismantle groups within the force that had themselves become criminal. The Director of Public Prosecutions was recently appointed direct from the national spy service and he has also adopted an exuberant posture. Kenya has a new Attorney General too, the amiable and plain speaking, Paul Kihara Kariuki, who took the unusual step of essentially taking a demotion from the Court of Appeal where he was a senior judge to become the new AG. This combination has lent new impetus to the anti- corruption drive.

What has been clear for some time is that Uhuru Kenyatta’s legacy won’t be initiatives like the Big Four. Indeed, the irrepressible Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) were already speculating about how the Big Four would be ‘eaten’ via a series of the kind of ‘tenders’ we have become accustomed to. The ‘handshake’ with Raila Odinga and how Kenyatta emerges from the ostensible struggle against the theft and plunder that has characterized his regime thus far, will likely have a more significant bearing on how Kenyans will remember him than railways and houses. The wealth this plunder has made available to our elite is essential to the structure and norms of our politics. It could therefore be that Mr. Kenyatta may have embarked on a project that can only succeed via the catalysing of a process to re-engineer Kenyan politics.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

East or West? What Africans Think of China and America

By John Githongo I remember in the 1980s having a great time with friends who were then living at the University of Nairobi halls of residence. A favourite stop-over for drinks was the Serena Hotel. This was the case at least until the price of beer was decontrolled in early 1993. Beer prices shot up and students were forced to humbler watering holes downtown. The Serena proceeded with a decade-long makeover that’s transformed it into today’s five star, increasingly al Shabaab-proof, world class hotel; and captains of industry and tenderprenuers never again had to share the urinals in the evening with opinionated and inebriated first year university students.

The process of decontrolling prices, generally liberalising the economy and politics accelerated exponentially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Successive Kenyan regimes have never been big on the social cost of their policies, but even Moi – with his finger ever on the political pulse of the nation – repeatedly balked when pushed by the World Bank and IMF to liberalise the economy through the 1980s. He was especially wedded to the inefficient parastatals that were highly effective political patronage machines. Indeed, it is ironic that in the 21st century, the National Youth Service, National Cereals and Produce Board, Kenya Power and Lighting Company, Kenya Pipeline Company, Uchumi Supermarkets and other such entities have assumed this mirro-role under the very noses of us Kenyans, and the very same Bretton Woods agencies that pushed for ‘reforms’ through the 1980s and 1990s.

I refer to the decontrol we experienced in the 1990s because it transformed Kenya’s sense of its own political and economic sovereignty. In 2003 when NARC came to power, economic advisors joked that officials at the Ministry of Finance were often bleary-eyed because they only went to sleep after they had checked in with the IMF in Washington. By 2008 Kenya had largely been weaned off its dependence on the architects of the Washington Consensus. It helped that China had dramatically raised its commercial profile on the continent in ways that elites could use to their economic and political advantage.

With this in mind and in hindsight, March was a most interesting month for Kenya. Indeed in just one week a series of events combined to affirm a significant reversal in Kenya’s economic sovereignty with far-reaching implications for our politics.

On the 6th of March, the Minister of Finance, Henry Rotich, made the surprise announcement that the government was ‘broke’. He would deny this a day later in rather incongruous fashion. On the same day he and the Central Bank Governor Patrick Njoroge essentially signed on to an IMF austerity programme.

It wasn’t the traditional IMF programme circa 1980/90s, but it nevertheless was an acknowledgment that we were complying with a range of ‘confidence building’ measures ‘agreed’ with the IMF as we renegotiated our expired precautionary facility with them. For a country like Kenya that has exposed itself to the winds of the international markets to underwrite an ongoing forex-denominated borrowing binge, the IMF’s confidence serves as an insurance to Wall Street that we can, for example, still make our upcoming Eurobond interest payments.

We find ourselves in a conditionality-straitjacket similar to Moi’s in the 1990s. This one may be more politely worded, but the conditions are just as lethal: to secure a six-month extension of the US$ 1.5 billion IMF Stand-by Arrangement, the Fund was demanding that Treasury “[reduces] its fiscal deficit and substantially modify interest controls’. The SBA was due to expire on March 13. Treasury was asking for what was in effect a last-ditch six month extension, to September 2018.

It is thus that the next day, March 7th, the IMF made its ‘end of mission’ pronouncement in Kenya’s regard. Two days later, on the 9th of March, Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga stepped out of Harambee House to their now famous ‘handshake’ that has temporarily reordered our politics. Coincidentally the American Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was visiting Kenya (and being sacked by President Trump at the same time). I should like to speculate that these events are related.

*****

In November 1991, speaking at a donor consultative meeting in Paris, Kenya’s Finance Minister, the late Professor George Saitoti, announced that the KANU regime had agreed to repeal Section 2A of the constitution and allow the reintroduction of political pluralism. Still, the donors imposed an aid freeze on Kenya primarily as a result of the failure of a pre-agreed economic ‘stabilisation’ programme.

In the years up to 1993 Kenya received over US$1 billion per annum in donor aid – most of it at concessionary rates from Western donors. Indeed, in 1989/90 Kenya received US$1.6 billion from them. And the year before in 1988, KANU had scrapped the secret ballot, holding elections where voters queued behind their candidates. So this aid wasn’t linked to our deteriorating politics then. As a result, the aid freeze of 1991 was not only economically traumatic, the trauma was also political. At the time our understanding was that Moi had caved into intense domestic and international pressure for political and economic liberalisation. That Saitoti chose to make the all-important announcement while facing donors, however, was itself significant. Some insiders at the World Bank at the time insist that Moi misread the moment. The World Bank and IMF had primarily been pressuring Kenya on the economic reform front. It was the bilaterals who had suddenly become more eager about progressive political change. Indeed, from the mid-1980s the regime had agreed to liberalise the economy which meant doing away with a range of parastatals (that at one point employed over 50 percent of civil servants); and the removal of foreign exchange and price controls, among a raft of other measures.

Initially the government acquiesced to the demands on the understanding that they would be implemented gradually. This was articulated in Sessional Paper No.1 of 1986. The subtext of the reforms would lead to the dismantling of President Moi patronage machine – it was, essentially, political suicide. So he dragged his feet. But then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Moi’s backers in the West, the US and UK in particular quickly started speaking a new language. Ambassadors who had never publicly agitated for transparency, human rights, good governance, accountability – the buzz- words of this new dispensation – when Kenya was a ‘pro-Western anti-communist bastion on the Eastern side of Africa’ suddenly changed their tune. President Moi criss-crossed Kenya complaining about this betrayal and warning that multipartyism in Kenya’s tribal context would lead to division and violence.

Faced with an aid freeze and under enormous pressure to liberalise both the economy and politics, Moi’s grudging acceptance of both was accompanied with his signing off on the Goldenberg scheme that promised to avail the much needed foreign exchange necessary to keep things going through the crunch and finance the 1992 multi-party elections. Thus the Goldenberg scandal was born. The people who walked Goldenberg into State House were the country’s long-serving spy chief, James Kanyotu, and his co-director in Goldenberg International Ltd, Kamlesh Pattni, a 27-year old small- time jeweller. The latter had been trying to flog the scheme to mandarins for some time without success. Now it was eagerly snapped up and transformed into the single most intense conflagration of political corruption in the country’s history.

Kenya saw 10 percent of GDP (US$1 billion at the time) extracted by the Goldenberg scams. The late Kanyotu had saved Moi’s bacon a couple of times before, notably in 1982 when he rushed to the Nyeri Agricultural Show on Friday July 30th to warn the President that Air Force officers were planning a coup and seeking permission to arrest them. Moi refused and the coup attempt took place that Sunday 1st August 1982. Moi in 1991, presented with a solution, did not hesitate to take it.

The people who walked Goldenberg into State House were the country’s long-serving spy chief, James Kanyotu, and his co-director in Goldenberg International Ltd, Kamlesh Pattni, a 27-year old small-time jeweller. The latter had been trying to flog the scheme to mandarins for some time without success. Now it was eagerly snapped up and transformed into the single most intense conflagration of political corruption in the country’s history.

*****

Kenya came out of a failed election process last year with a regime devoid of legitimacy; an economy steeped in debt and hobbled by a wild cycle of looting; an emboldened opposition speaking for almost 70 percent of the country and resolutely implementing a political programme Jubilee couldn’t respond to without a campaign of violence that threatened to burn the entire house down.

For Uhuru Kenyatta, the start of 2018 presented an almost insurmountable set of challenges: implementing an austerity programme while having to deal with a focused opposition breathing down his neck. But he had one thing Moi didn’t have in 1991: the support of both the West and the Bretton Woods institutions. As sub-Saharan Africa teeters on the brink of another debt crisis, the IMF has been generally silent, as even status-quo Western development economists are beginning to question the wisdom and sustainability of the debt binge numerous developing countries have embarked on over the past decade. Here in Kenya David Ndii has been flagging the issue for six years non-stop.

It is probably pure coincidence that the March 9th ‘handshake’ between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta that relieved so much political pressure from the Jubilee regime came at a moment when Kenyatta needed all the economic wriggle room that the crisis could allow. But just as in Moi’s case in 1991, the handshake deal was fronted, not by the usual political or bureaucratic types, but by the men from the shadows who give advice on matters of national security and preservation of the regime. Indeed, the politicos and bureaucrats were largely cut out of the handshake arrangement. On every side many seemed as surprised by it as most Kenyans. Add to this the fact that the appointed interlocutors are Mr. Odinga’s lawyer, Paul Mwangi, and Dr. Martin Kimani, the head of counter terrorism.

I have argued before that Kenya’s elite has often been most amenable to giving up political ground when they are in a fiscal bind. Considered together the political and economic events of March are interesting in their similarities, no matter how apparently tenuous, to the situation in 1991 when Moi reached out to his friend and spy chief (who retired that same year), to sort out the mess of having to win a multi-party election at any cost and finding the resources to do it in the middle of an aid freeze. Kenyatta is attempting to manage his own succession with the economy in a mess; the politics polarised but opposition demobilised for now; and, in the midst of a looting spree that makes Goldenberg look like a minor hold-up in a corner shop. Behind it all one cannot help that feeling that, as they say, ‘we just got owned!’ Literally in our case as Kenyans.

(Research by Juliet A. Atellah)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.