Catching the Big Fish!

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado 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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado At Sh3 trillion (US$29 billion), Kenya’s budget for the 2018/2019 financial year is the highest spending plan in Kenya’s financial history, an increase of 10% from the previous financial year. According to Treasury, just over half or Sh1.74 trillion (US$19 billion) will be raised through taxes and government fees while another Sh558 billion will be raised from domestic and external borrowing, including concessional loans which, via a combination of lower interest rates and longer grace periods, are acquired from donor countries and institutions on terms substantially more generous than market loans. However, this will still leave a Sh772 billion hole in the government’s books.

The budget has been widely observed as a balancing act between implementing the strategic big four agenda -boosting manufacturing activities, enhancing food and nutrition security, achieving universal health coverage and supporting the construction of at least 500,000 affordable houses by 2022 – and financing other government commitments.

However, the budget hits ordinary consumers the hardest through increases in taxes on essential goods and services, including flour and bread, fuel and electricity. Further, a 0.5% tax on employee’s gross monthly salary to go to the National Housing Development Fund alongside a matching contribution by employers, has been introduced. The well-heeled will also pay more for high powered luxury vehicles, duty on which has been increased from 20% to 30%.

The budget comes against a backdrop of massive corruption scandals that have stalked the Jubilee administration since it came into power in 2013.

Sources: National Assembly’s Budget and Appropriation Committee, Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) 2016/17 Report and newspaper reports.

Written by Joe Kobuthi, compiled by Juliet Atellah and designed by Bwana Mdogo.

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

On the evening of the day that saw twenty National Youth Service (NYS) officials arraigned in court to answer charges of institutional corruption, I went to see one of the lawyers who had been in court and who spoke to me on the condition that I would not disclose her identity. She was nonplussed about all the hullabaloo surrounding the NYS scandals and the subsequent parading of some senior government officials in the corridors of justice. “The courts have seen these kinds of court dramas before: nothing new and nothing out of the ordinary. It’s their season. They will come and go and the courts will go back to their usual routines. Take it from me, the courts are not in a mood to execute the Executive’s factional wars in the name of fighting state corruption,” she stated.

The advocate described the ensuing drama as a big, noisy circus. “I’m a trial lawyer,” she said. “If there will be any prosecutions, I will be glad for another day. What I’m saying is this: NYS 1 was juicier than this NYS 2 farce – were there any prosecutions? I hear it is the ‘Imperial’ legacy term. Please get me correctly: there will be no prosecutions, this is a circus show and NYS 3 is yet to come up.” (The lawyer was referring to the two multi-billion-shilling corruption scandals at the NYS, dubbed NYS Season 1 and NYS Season 2, within a short period of just three years.)

“Fish begins to rot from the head”

The fight against institutional corruption is not about fixing a certain cadre of people who don’t have the political connections and wherewithal and who will most likely be innocent victims or pawns in the political chess games of corrupt and powerful individuals, said the advocate. “It is immoral to harass and punish civil servants who are used as conduits of corruption by powerful state officials and politicians and when the crunch time comes, instead of the hammer falling at the right place, they are used as scapegoats. The NYS 1 corruption scandal involved powerful state officials who owned up to money getting lost. Some of them were even hauled in the courts of law – were there any convictions? Some of the NYS1 culprits are even more powerful today and presiding over bigger budgets. Let him [President Uhuru Kenyatta] fool no one that he is fighting corruption. Fish begins to rot from the head.” The lawyer acknowledged that the civil servants were also corrupt and the reason they were being hounded is because they had exposed their greed, hence were found culpable.

A Treasury official told me that the fish had been rotting for a long, long time. “What you’re seeing is the whirlwind before the calm. Everything about this razzmatazz sting operation stinks to high heaven. The biggest amount of money in the government is usually stolen just before the government closes its financial year and reads its budget. This year’s budget was read on June 14, so that means the 2018/2019 financial begins on July 1. It is not, in my view, a coincidence or for nothing that the government allegedly decided to release the dossier on NYS weeks before the national budget day. The coffers will be emptied before they are refilled again.”

The official said that in the two weeks before the budget is read, those who have the authority to incur expenses (AIEs), accountants and procurement personnel scheme to pilfer government money. Since the government is expected to close its books, all the monies that have been allocated for whatever use have to either be returned or expended. “This is the time when fictitious payments are paid out by accountants and AIE holders, who include directors, heads of department and permanent secretaries. The two weeks before the budget is read are always very busy as procurement officers invent ways of disbursing government money to dubious and hollow companies as they collude with the accountants and AIE holders to defraud the government,” said the Treasury official. “It is ridiculous for the President to talk about using polygraphs to gauge whether civil servants will be corrupt or not. Corruption is solely an ethical issue – it is not about whether you can master a truth test. If the government is interested to know, for example, who among the civil servants are corrupt, it should begin by conducting a lifestyle audit among AIE holders, accountants and procurement officers. “The biggest amount of money in the government is usually stolen just before the government closes its financial year and reads its budget.”

The officer told me that the NYS report on the said scandals was ostensibly leaked by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to media houses to create the impression that the media had simultaneously and suddenly stumbled on a massive corruption scandal. “These NYS scandals have always been there, they are not fresh scandals,” said the civil servant. “The impression one gets from government is that the corruption being exposed now could have happened just recently. Suffice it to say, they are a smokescreen of a much bigger scam that could be on its way. They are a farcical high drama of up-round-and-merry-go-round shows and Kenyans love street shows for their cathartic effects.”

“This is no longer corruption but outright theft”

But for Babra Singh, an elderly shopkeeper in Nairobi, the NYS scandals are like the street dramas he has witnessed in the city for many years – except that these scandals are not entertaining but truly tragic. “This is no longer corruption but outright theft,” said Babra in his tiny office on Kirinyaga Street. “I witnessed Jomo Kenyatta’s corruption, then Moi’s, which, sad to say, was assisted by some of our crooked Asian brothers. Then came Mwai Kibaki’s corruption with the Chinese, which was also massive. But Uhuru’s corruption has spiralled out of control; it is no longer corruption, it is purely mega theft, looting of unprecedented proportions, criminally driven by people who simply don’t care about the country.”

Babra was 18-years-old when he first set up his bicycle duka on the dusty Grogan Road in 1954, two years after President Uhuru Kenyatta’s father, Jomo, was detained by the British colonial government and a state of emergency was declared. Grogan (now known as Kirinyaga) Road was named after the rabidly racist Briton, Ewart Grogan, who later emigrated to apartheid South Africa in 1961 after he swore that he would never be ruled by a black leader (Kenyatta had been released from detention in 1959 and was poised to be Kenya’s first Prime Minister.)

“Since 2015, I’ve been laying off my workers one by one; what you see here is just skeletal staff. The cost of production exacerbated by unwieldy importation tax on spare parts, hefty bribes demanded by the customs officials and theft of spare parts by the very same customs officials had become unmanageable,” said Babra, who is a devout Sikh. “I’ve seen my workers – some of them have been with me for 40-plus years – become poorer and poorer by the day. I’m 82-years-old now. Much of my energy has been sapped out of me. I’m no longer as strong as I used to be and I’ve been keeping the company running, not because of me, but because of my workers.”

A. Gikandi, an aspiring politician from Kiambu County, told me that Kiambu residents, who happen to be the bastion of Uhuru’s ethnic support base, are poorer today than when Uhuru became president in 2013. Gikandi, who did not want his full name revealed said, “They’d very much like to explain their increasing levels of poverty by blaming other forces and not President Uhuru’s government, maybe because that makes them feel better, but the truth of the matter is they just can’t: his government has not helped them in any way. These spurious NYS scandals have not made them angry because they are fast becoming immune to anger. They are simply bamboozled that so much money, running into billions, can be stolen to enrich a few well-connected cabals while they can’t afford the daily necessities of life.”

The people are exasperated, he said. They are disengaged. Many of the “tenderpreneurs” mentioned in the scandals are millennials (he himself is one) “and, in fact, one of the people mentioned is a friend. To be honest, I was surprised when I saw his name mentioned. I called him up.” He added that his friend told him that connections to powerful state mandarins had got his name expunged from the final list of tenderpreneurs.

“It is absurd that you can pretend to prosecute a Principal Secretary and other senior civil servants and leave out the Cabinet Secretary,” said Gikandi. “Nothing happens in the ministries without full authorisation of the CS. Is it a miracle that the responsible CS is off the hook? She is properly wired.”

“Only a revolution will save this country”

Only a revolution will save this country, said the political aspirant. “The conditions are not ripe yet – but we’re headed there. After the national budget pronouncements, life will become even harder. We are headed for tougher times because austerity measures are here with us.” The crux of the matter, said Gikandi, is that it is the Kikuyu people who are suffering the most, but they cannot vocalise their disenchantment because they have been made to believe they have a collective duty not to be seen to be critising one of their own. “Don’t be surprised if the revolution begins with them,” he added.

A day after President Uhuru Kenyatta presided over the June 1st Madaraka celebrations this year in Meru town, 250km north of Nairobi, I went to see my friend Dennis Kimani, who is a second-hand clothes seller. “Did you listen to Uhuru yesterday?” he asked me. “I was so disappointed by Uhuru, talking about some gadgets to detect lying civil servants. I asked my wife whether what I was hearing was real. The people are crying, the people are suffering, the people are down, and all what Uhuru is talking about is importing lie detectors.”

Dennis told me he voted for Uhuru in the 2017 elections. “We Kikuyus are in a bind. When it comes to politics, we exhibit a herd mentality that has become so difficult to extricate ourselves from. On October 26 [the day of the repeat presidential elections], I had to be seen to have gone to vote – by my relatives and business friends – lest I’m branded bad names such as I’m a traitor, betrayer to the cause, NASA sympathiser, a Luo, or worst of all, have my Kikuyu identity questioned.”

For Jayne Rose Wairimu, a mother of three and a bookseller in Thika in Kiambu County, 40 km northeast of Nairobi, the decision not to participate in electoral politics was precisely because of “what we are now reading in the press on the orchestrated NYS scandals”. She said she did not vote in 2017 because elections had become pointless and futile. “The NYS saga is a racket by the two most powerful politicians in the country, President Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto. These monies that are being flung right, left and centre have been stolen on their behalf. You cannot convince me otherwise. It is so immoral to parade non-entities and hapless civil servants to hoodwink Kenyans that the state is now fighting corruption. NYS is Uhuru’s eating machine. Kibaki had his, the roads built by the Chinese. Moi’s was the Goldenberg scandal and such is life.”

Wairimu said that in this country you can engage in all manner of state corruption as long you have two cardinal things: tonnes of money and political influence. “Remember Kabura? She even confessed to carrying sacks of money. On whose behalf was she ferrying the money?”

Josephine Kabura was believed to be the hairdresser of the former influential and powerful Devolution Ministry Cabinet Secretary, Ann Waiguru. In her affidavit, Kabura named Waiguru as the focal point of the first Sh1.6 billion heist at NYS. The scam led the embattled Waiguru to resign in November 2016, but not before President Uhuru had defended her as a hardworking CS. Of particular interest was that in one year, the NYS budget had jumped from Sh13 billion to Sh25 billion. “Trust me, I smell a rat…There’s huge corruption coming… And then, as usual, the government will spin another yarn – ng’ano cia marimo (ogre tales). Uhuru is not fighting corruption, he’s engaging in a political circus,” said the bookseller.

“Remember Kabura? She even confessed to carrying sacks of money. On whose behalf was she ferrying the money?”

In Kikuyu town, Kiambu County, Amos Gatina, a businessman, told me that the NYS missing monies have just not gone missing now. “These are old corruption networks, some of which, I believe, were used to finance the second presidential election on October 26. All these funny people who are now being lined up for show were just conveyer belts. These NYS scandals are a melodrama created by Uhuru and his people to fool people that in his second term he’s going to be a no-nonsense President.” That the corruption scandals were being revealed this time told a much bigger story than just the government being interested in chasing corrupt state officials, he observed.

Gatina told me that the country was being run by political and financial mafia. “The Central Bank of Kenya governor, Patrick Njoroge, has a lot of explaining to do. How can all these financial shenanigans be going on around him, yet he is sitting pretty? Second-tier banks were used as conduits to transfer and withdraw humongous amounts of money, flagrantly breaking all the banking rules and you want to tell me we’ve not ceded the country to criminal gangs?”

“It is Ruto who is being fought”

A public policy analyst who worked with Uhuru Kenyatta in 2003 when the latter was the leader of the opposition, told me that the President is all talk and nothing more. “These fulminations about the NYS scandals by Uhuru are just that – fulminations. His railing against the pervasive corruption is nothing more than ensuring that [William] Ruto doesn’t succeed him. The scandals have been released to the public, not because the government has suddenly stumbled on runaway corruption, but because the Deputy President must be stopped from becoming President in 2022. It is Ruto who is being fought. Period.” The policy analyst said that he had advised Uhuru, who chaired the Parliamentary Accounts Committee on financial and economic matters, regarding his lead role in checking Kibaki’s government. “He never did anything. His was to fulminate and exhibit great annoyance, but it was all for public show.”

In January 2009, Uhuru Kenyatta was appointed by President Mwai Kibaki as one of two Deputy Prime Ministers and as Minister of Finance. In May of that year, he was involved in a Sh9.2 billion scam at the Treasury. “Do you remember how Uhuru explained away the scandal?” the policy analyst asked me: “He casually termed it as a computer glitch.” The issue of an extra Sh9.2billion being added to the Supplementary Budget had been raised by Imenti Central MP, Gitobu Imanyara. On May 11, Uhuru, accompanied by his Permanent Secretary, Joseph Kinyua, told the Parliamentary Budget Committee that, “yes, there may be a typing error, but that to me may not be a major cause of alarm.” (The committee exonerated Uhuru.)

A senior civil servant at the Ministry of Health told me he was unimpressed by Uhuru’s supposedly tough talk on the NYS scandals. “The president’s unconvincing assurances that money stolen from NYS will be recovered, and the subsequent threats that all those involved in the scandals should carry their own cross and will be punished, is just blowing hot air.” The bureaucrat said that one of the biggest scams to be unearthed during President Uhuru’s first term was in the health ministry. “We all know some of the people involved in forming dubious companies to swindle the ministry of hundreds of millions of shillings. A scandal doesn’t stop being a scandal because it was schemed by close relatives of the president and, therefore, conveniently swept under the carpet and ignored.”

Ten days after the President had hosted the Anti-Corruption, Governance and Accountability Summit – a public relations breakfast meeting ostensibly to carry out a corruption reality check and to have a “frank” discussion on how to curb runaway corruption – at State House in October 2016, his sister, Nyokabi Kenyatta Muthama, was named as one of the people who, in September 2013, barely five months into Uhuru’s first term, had already formed a company to supply goods to the ministry. Nyokabi, with their cousin Kathleen Kihanya, had registered Sundales International Company Limited on September 12, 2013. On October 29, 2016, The Star reported that the company, had been awarded five tenders worth Sh270 million by the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (KEMSA).

The senior civil servant at the health ministry told me that the media’s exposé of the scandal, so soon after Uhuru’s breakfast meeting, was a calculated move by the Deputy President to embarrass the President. Why? Because, he said, the Ruto camp had interpreted the summit as a charade whose upshot was that state corruption was being perpetrated by the Deputy President and his henchmen. “No sooner had the debate on corruption at State House been over than his [Ruto’s] people were all over at the ministry looking for the ‘Nyokabi files’. What I am saying is the Ruto people leaked that scandal to the media within days as a way of fighting back the mantra that ‘It is William Ruto who’s corrupt and not the President’. These factional fights between the Uhuru and Ruto camps did not start now.”

Seemingly frustrated by the unceasing corruption in his government, President Kenyatta, while talking down to, among others, the then Attorney General, Prof. Githu Muigai, the Auditor General, Edward Ouko, and the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Paul Kihara (who succeeded Githu as the new Attorney General in 2018), moaned loudly: “Do you expect me to go set up a firing squad at Uhuru Park so that people can be happy?” Earlier on, the President, in a speech, had said that “corruption is just being used as a political circus.”

State House mandarins had invited two of the most vocal voices on state corruption, John Githongo and the economist David Ndii, to the breakfast meeting. The two declined the offer, which they interpreted as a ruse by State House officials to dupe Kenyans into believing that the President was serious about fighting corruption.

Indeed, a political stalwart of the former Party of National Unity (PNU), which ushered in Mwai Kibaki’s controversial second term and who is still very close to the former President, said, “There’s nothing new in these supposed corruption exposés. These are old corruption perpetrated by the state itself. Let’s cut to the chase: it is William Ruto who’s being fought here. This is about succession politics for 2022. He [Ruto] now needs to know who’s really in charge and what they are doing is cutting him to size.”

This former PNU official observed that Ruto showed his hand too early in wanting to succeed Uhuru. “He was abrasive, cocky and openly disrespectful to President Uhuru. You may be indeed intelligent and smarter than your boss, but in politics, you never undermine or seem to undermine the President. It is a cardinal rule anywhere in the world. Of all the things that Ruto learnt from [former president] Daniel arap Moi, he didn’t take home the most important lessons – humility and quietly biding your time.”

A bromance gone sour

In the days and weeks after assuming power in 2013, Uhuru and Ruto were inseparable, the “bromance” kept alive by sometimes dressing alike – matching white shirts and red ties, high-fives and always appearing in public with broad smiles and easy laughs. Then Uhuru would not have dared to describe his deputy as a reckless young man because it was a co-presidency. However, after a short five years, the bromance is fast fading. The pretence of co-presidency is gone and the exposure of corruption are signs of a factional fight over “brotherly love” gone sour.

“Uhuru couldn’t act between 2013 and 2017 because he needed a second term,” said a former Nairobi city councillor. “Now that he has crossed the bridge, he must wield the sword.” For the former councillor, “wielding the sword” means calling Ruto’s bluff. “Most of the corruption in the government is committed by Ruto and his henchmen, so he must be tamed. Between now and 2022, Ruto will not do anything else other than engage in presidential campaigns. Where do you think the money he is dishing out in harambee after harambee countrywide is coming from? The state resource taps must be shut tight to deny him any funds.”

The former councillor was, however, despondent about revelations about the looting: “Matikiire muno. Thirikari eno ya Uhuru ni iire muno.” (They’ve stolen too much, this Uhuru administration is stealing too much money.) “I pity our children and grandchildren. The country is sliding very fast into a bottomless pit and I don’t see a future at this rate.”

On May 30, 2018, while presiding over the issuance of title deeds in Embakasi East constituency in Nairobi County, President Uhuru Kenyatta, apparently unprovoked, described his deputy thus: “Hii kijana anaitwa Ruto unajua kila wikendi ana tanga tanga kila pahali. Atakuwa anapitia hizi machorochoro akiona kuna kitu inaenda kona kona mumwambie, si namna hiyo? Si namna hiyo? Tuhakikishe kazi ya wananchi imefanyika…tumekumbaliana? Ni wa ngapi wamesema tuwache siasa twende kazi? Twende kazi….” (This young man called Ruto is loitering everywhere every weekend. He has taken to roaming everywhere. He will be passing by and, if he sees things are not working as they ought to be, you report to him, is that okay? Is that okay? Let’s ensure the ordinary people’s work is done…are we agreed? How many of you concur that we stop politicking so that we work? Let’s get to work.)

The PNU official told me that the President’s use of the word “kutangatanga” (loitering) was a warning to Ruto. His remarks were intended to let his deputy know that “we are aware the slush funds you’re using every weekend to campaign are gotten from the state coffers”. Bottom line: the NYS corruption scandals have been unearthed supposedly to seal the loopholes. “So, take it from me, nobody’s going to jail, but Ruto must feel the full force of the state machinery and perhaps for the first time, must realise who’s in charge.” 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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

In an apparent move to stem the corruption scourge that has infested virtually every government department, President Uhuru Kenyatta recently directed all public servants and politicians, including members of his own cabinet, to undergo lifestyle audits. The intention, presumably, is to determine whether state officials have used their positions to acquire ill-gotten wealth.

The question on many Kenyans’ minds, however, is whether the president will subject himself to such an audit. But then maybe he doesn’t need to: he and his family were fabulously wealthy when he became president in 2013 and will remain so when he leaves office at the end of his second and last term in 2022.

In 2011, Uhuru Kenyatta (estimated to be worth $500 million) was listed by Forbes as one of the richest men in Africa. Although he was dropped from subsequent lists “because of new information regarding the complex distribution of business assets among the Kenyatta family members”, there is no doubt that his family is among the wealthiest in the country. The Kenyatta family has majority shareholding in a vast array of commercial businesses in Kenya, including Heritage Hotels, MediaMax, Commercial Bank of Africa and Brookside Dairy Ltd, which controls 45 per cent of the processed milk market in Kenya. The family also owns vast tracts of land across the country, most of which was acquired during Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency following independence in 1963.

The question one might ask is how this wealth was acquired. And if the wealth that the Kenyatta family currently owns is the result of its past access to political power, then should Uhuru Kenyatta hand it back to its rightful owners in an act of restitution, reconciliation and redemption?

CIA revelations

These were the questions that also consumed the CIA and the United States government in August 1978 when Jomo Kenyatta, Uhuru’s father and the founding father and first president of independent Kenya, died. Then the US government was worried that a change in government might lead to demands for wealth redistribution among those who had been adversely affected by the Kenyatta family’s various land grabs. The US government believed that if this were to happen, a revolution or civil strife might ensue, which would impact American geopolitical and economic interests in the country.

A CIA report prepared shortly after Kenyatta’s death said that while Jomo Kenyatta owned only about half a dozen properties covering roughly 4,000 hectares (mainly farms in Kiambu and the Rift Valley), his wife, First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta, owned at least 115,000 hectares of land and also had a big stake in ruby mining and in beach resorts around Mombasa. The report, which was declassified in 2017 and whose contents were published in Kenya’s Standard newspaper on 29 January 2017, implicated the Kenyatta family in various illegal activities, including secretive exports of ivory, which was banned.

One CIA memo stated: “Mama Ngina and Margaret Kenyatta [Jomo’s daughter from his first wife Wahu] are probably the country’s two largest charcoal and ivory traders – particularly lucrative businesses. Although the export of these items is banned because depletion of Kenya’s forests and wildlife threaten the underpinning of the Kenyan economy, both women have been able to obtain special licenses.” The CIA believed that the Kenyatta family was “resented” because of a public perception that it had acquired wealth illegally or through fraud. There were even rumours that Mama Ngina planned to flee the country after her husband died to escape being penalised for the various economic crimes she had been implicated in. In October 1973, five years before Kenyatta died, Martin Shikuku, the then MP for Butere, had even warned that if the Kikuyu did not share the fruits of independence with others, they would be “eaten up by the other 41 tribes like a satisfied hyena was eaten up by hungry hyenas”.

The fear at that time was that Kenyatta’s successor, President Daniel arap Moi, would reverse the Kenyatta-era land-related and other injustices by targeting Kikuyu elites who had benefitted from Kenyatta’s patronage. This fear, however, was unfounded – not only did Moi follow in Kenyatta’s footsteps by grabbing land for himself, he also entrenched a patronage network that mostly benefitted members of his own ethnic group, the Kalenjin.

In a diplomatic cable sent in 1979, the then US ambassador to Kenya, Anthony Marshall, stated: “Contrary to the expectations of many, the Kenyatta family and the close associates of the former president have not been attacked by the new government on the issue of the corrupt means through which they obtained much of their wealth. On the other hand, we hear that Moi has let it be known that, while he will not stop anyone from enjoying his ill-gotten gains, the game is over for the Kenyatta clique and no more corruption will be tolerated from them.” (Note: Moi did not condemn corruption per se, just corruption among the Kikuyu elite and the power wielded by powerful Kikuyu politicians, who he quickly sidelined to assert his authority.)

Million Acre Scheme: The first betrayal

The first large-scale land grab in independent Kenya began during the first few years of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency when a resettlement scheme was implemented to “buy back” one million acres of land from white settlers in order to resettle displaced (mostly Kikuyu) Kenyans. Kenyatta had argued then that since the British colonialists and white settlers had taken land away from indigenous African communities, they were obliged to fund a large-scale settlement programme – using long-term loans with easy repayment conditions – to provide land to the landless.

However, a group led by Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggia and Paul Ngei opposed the buying of land for resettlement; they argued that Africans could not buy back land that was originally theirs, a contention that did not go down well with Kenyatta because “there were no free things and that land was not free, but must be purchased”. Kenyatta’s position mirrored that of the outgoing British colonial administration that made it clear that “African settlers could not get free land but were expected to either purchase it directly with their money or borrow the loan that was to be repaid to the British government”. It is believed that one of the main reasons Kenyatta was selected to lead the country’s transition to independence was because he had made a secret pact with the British colonial government not to hurt British and white settler interests in the country.

According to the 2013 report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), “His [Kenyatta’s] position shocked many of the KANU supporters who felt that he and his allies betrayed them because the political leaders had made a decision to the effect that Africans would recover their stolen land after independence”.

This first betrayal would be followed by many others. Bruce Mackenzie, the then Minister of Agriculture – the only white man in Kenyatta’s cabinet who it is believed was also a spy for British and Israeli intelligence – spearheaded the design of two types of resettlement schemes: the so-called “yeoman” scheme in which large farms would be sold to experienced farmers for £500 and a second type of scheme that targeted small-scale farmers who could purchase farms for £100. Approximately 35,000 families were eventually settled through what was known as the One Million Acre Scheme.

To enable Africans to purchase these farms, the British government, with a contribution from the World Bank, advanced a loan of £7.5 million to the Kenyan government. Unfortunately, as the TJRC report notes, the Mackenzie proposals were focused largely on the so-called White Highlands in Central Kenya and the Rift Valley and did not give serious consideration to the need to resettle the Mijikenda at the coast who, due to historical reasons that predated British colonialism, had been rendered largely landless. Moreover, as the scheme operated on a “willing-seller-willing-buyer” basis, hundreds of thousands of people, particularly in the coast and Rift Valley regions, remained landless.

The scheme also offered loans to Africans who had not been displaced. In this group fell a select group of people who had been loyal to the colonial administration – the so-called homeguards – who gobbled up prime land in Central Kenya and the Rift Valley. Among this group were provincial commissioners, ministers, permanent secretaries and others within Kenyatta’s inner circle who would go on to become Kenya’s new ruling elite.

According to the TJRC report, “rich businessmen and businesswomen, rich and powerful politicians who were loyal to the colonial administration, managed to acquire thousands of acres at the expense of the poor and the landless.” Hence, “instead of redressing land-related injustices perpetrated by the colonialists on Africans, the resettlement process created a privileged class of African elites, leaving those who had suffered land alienation either on tiny unproductive pieces of land or landless.”

Even some well-known freedom fighters, such Bildad Kaggia, were relegated to the wayside, thus giving birth to a new Kikuyu underclass that was both landless and poor. In fact, Kaggia, who had been jailed in Kapenguria by the colonial authorities in 1952 alongside Kenyatta, was often berated by the latter for not using his name and influence to enrich himself. Kaggia was not moved by the president’s admonitions; till his death in 2005, Kaggia remained a relatively poor man, as did many of the families of Mau Mau fighters, who were quickly forgotten as soon as Jomo was released from jail. (In fact, Kenyatta never lifted the ban imposed on the Mau Mau by the British; it remained a proscribed organisation till 2003.)

According to the TJRC report, “rich businessmen and businesswomen, rich and powerful politicians who were loyal to the colonial administration, managed to acquire thousands of acres at the expense of the poor and the landless.” Hence, “instead of redressing land- related injustices perpetrated by the colonialists on Africans, the resettlement process created a privileged class of African elites, leaving those who had suffered land alienation either on tiny unproductive pieces of land or landless.”

Subsequent movements to reclaim land that was stolen or deceptively acquired, such as the Mungiki (which later morphed into a criminal gang, and which has also been linked to the post-2007 election violence) and the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), which has been crushed into obscurity by the authorities, failed to bring about the land reforms needed to address such historical injustices.

The Mungiki were the outcome of the exclusionary settlement schemes of the Kenyatta era that blocked large numbers of Kikuyu peasants from owning their own land. Some of their members are believed to be the victims of the ethnic clashes that took place in parts of the Rift Valley prior to the 1992 and 1997 elections when Kikuyus began mobilising to repulse attacks by the Kalenjin.

Although the Mungiki (which means “the multitude” in Gikuyu) had a strong constituency among the rural landless and squatters in areas such as Londiani, Molo and Laikipia, it ended up being an urban-based movement whose members could be found in Githurai, Dandora, Mathare, Korogocho and other Nairobi slums. Here they initially operated as vigilante groups, providing security in the absence of state protection. Eventually its members began behaving like criminal gangs, controlling matatu routes and operating extortion rackets. In 2007, the then Minister of Internal Security in the Mwai Kibaki administration, John Michuki (who had been a colonial district officer, which earned him the nickname kimendeero or the crusher, and who had acquired enormous wealth during the Kenyatta years), ordered the elimination of Mungiki from the slums – an order that was widely condemned by human rights groups. It is estimated that as many as 500 Mungiki members were killed by the police during this time.

In 2008, Mungiki rebranded itself as the Kenya National Youth Alliance, a political organisation with a membership of some 1.5 million. In November 2009, the organisation’s spokesperson, Njuguna Gitau Njuguna, was gunned down by unknown assassins. Since then the group has largely gone underground.

TJRC and the sins of the father

Uhuru Kenyatta had an opportunity to pay for the sins of his father, so to speak, when he assumed the presidency in 2013, but as the shenanigans around the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission illustrate, he has no time or inclination to address historical land injustices, particularly those perpetrated by his own family. At first Uhuru refused to receive the TJRC’s report, and when he finally reluctantly received it on 21st May 2013, he failed to endorse its recommendations or even to discuss its contents. (The TJRC’s website has since been disabled.)

A statement of dissent (available at the Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons website) by three of the TJRC’s commissioners – Professor Ronald C. Slye, Ambassador Berhanu Dinka and Judge Gertrude Chawatma – reveals the cloak-and-dagger environment that prevailed at the Commission, and how some commissioners were coopted into downplaying, changing or deleting certain sections of the TJRC’s final report that mentioned the Kenyatta family adversely. According to the dissenting commissioners, a copy of the land chapter of the report appeared to have been leaked to “individuals with ties to State House”. At around this time, some of the commissioners began receiving phone calls from a senior official in the Office of the President who suggested various changes to the land chapter.

Said the dissent statement: “With much regret, and after many tireless days of trying to reach a reasonable compromise, we are obligated by our conscience and the oath that we took when we joined this Commission, to dissent completely from the amendments made after 3 May 2013 to this chapter in this Volume devoted to Land – Chapter 2 of this Volume 28.”

According to the dissenting commissioners, a copy of the land chapter of the report appeared to have been leaked to “individuals with ties to State House”. At around this time, some of the commissioners began receiving phone calls from a senior official in the Office of the President who suggested various changes to the land chapter.

All the five paragraphs that had apparently been changed or deleted by some of the commissioners without the unanimous approval of all the commissioners had to do with land grabs by the Kenyatta family. Although the dissenting commissioners acknowledged that they could “not in any way assert that the content of these paragraphs reflects the truth”, they insisted that they did “reflect the testimony and other information provided to the Commission”.

The following excerpt of the original unchanged paragraph 257, which the three commissioners made available to the public, reflects the nature of land grabbing along Kenya’s coastal region and shows how Jomo Kenyatta betrayed the trust of those who believed that independence would deliver land and social justice to them.

“…in 1972, President Kenyatta unlawfully alienated to himself 250 acres of the land, especially portions on the beach. He also allocated part of the land to his friends, relatives and other associates. He directed residents that whatever was left of the trust lands would be established as settlement schemes for their benefit. However, without following the due procedure of law, he again took part of whatever remained for himself and his relatives. He also demanded that the local communities that should have benefitted from the trust lands accept payment of KSh600 per acre. When the locals declined to accept the money, he told them that whether or not they accepted it, the remainder of the trust lands would go to the government. That is how irregularly President Kenyatta took all of Tiwi and Diani trust lands at the expense of the local people who immediately became ‘squatters’ on the land and were subsequently evicted, rendering them landless and poor. By 2012, land in the former trust lands fetched KSh15 million per acre.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Mombasa Republican Council, a ragtag group of peasants demanding secession of the coast region and restitution for landless people, started in Kwale County, one of the coast region’s most impoverished areas. The group’s rallying cry “Pwani si Kenya” (Coast is not Kenya) reflects the adversarial relationship between landless coastal communities and the Kenyan state. MRC’s grievances stem from a variety of conditions, including marginalisation and landlessness.

Government data shows that four of the six coastal counties (namely, Tana River, Malindi, Kwale and Kilifi) rank among the poorest in Kenya. These counties also generally have high illiteracy rates and low rates of school enrolment. Land tenure is ambiguous or is not officially recognised. More than 60 per cent of indigenous coastal people do not possess title deeds to their land. Others have entered into a kind of quasi squatter-tenant agreement with land owners.

The MRC was criminalised by the Mwai Kibaki government (which often referred to it as an Islamic terrorist organisation even though many of its members are Christian). The government refused MRC’s application to be registered as a civil society organisation and banned it in 2008. Police routinely disrupted the group’s meetings and many of its members were jailed. The group has since remained subdued but the coastal people’s demands for secession did re-emerge as a campaign issue during the last general election in 2017.

The criminalisation of groups demanding land justice has created resentment among disenfranchised communities. This does not augur well for the stability of the country. As the TJRC concluded, there is a very close link between land injustices and ethnic violence in Kenya. This was evident during the 2007/2008 post-election violence when (mostly poor) Kikuyus were killed or forcefully removed from land in the Rift Valley (which the Kalenjin claim belongs to them). The TJRC also found that land-related injustices at the coast constitute one of the key reasons for underdevelopment in the area.

The Commission emphasised that the 2010 constitution provides a sound basis to address land- related injustices – “but only if there is political will to use these laws and institutions.” However, Uhuru Kenyatta is unlikely to implement the TJRC’s recommendations or to acknowledge the role his own family played in land-related historical injustices.

Furthermore, the newly created National Land Commission that is mandated to look into these issues and to bring about some form of adjudication or restitution for the landless has not yet yielded significant results. On the contrary, the Commission has recently been embroiled in various corruption scandals related to land, which has further eroded Kenyans’ hopes of finally settling the land question.

The Commission emphasised that the 2010 constitution provides a sound basis to address land-related injustices – “but only if there is political will to use these laws and institutions.” However, Uhuru Kenyatta is unlikely to implement the TJRC’s recommendations or to acknowledge the role his own family played in land-related historical injustices.

It is, therefore, evident that wealth declarations and lifestyle audits will not in of themselves resolve historical land injustices that continue to disenfranchise and impoverish a large proportion of the country’s population. Unless there is demonstrated political will to address these injustices, attempts to fight corruption through lifestyle audits will appear like hollow gestures that try to treat a deep wound with salt.

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 Gado

At Sh3 trillion, anyway you cut it, Kenya’s recently unveiled national budget is a monster. It is bigger than the combined budgets of the other four East Africa Community countries. It is nearly double the then record-breaking budget unveiled in the first year of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s first term. To finance it, the government plans to hoover up Sh1.7 trillion in taxes and to borrow another Sh560 billion. However, that will still leave a Sh770 billion hole – roughly the size of Uganda’s 2017 budget.

A budget that size is bound to raise eyebrows and to whet appetites. It has also been presented at a most inopportune time as the country is caught up in the throes of a hysteria over corruption. Each day, it seems, brings new exposés of theft of billions of shillings of public money. The scale of the stealing is fueling a fevered search for scapegoats and there is a literal cry for blood in the street as legislators compete to propose ever more draconian punishments (including public executions) for anyone convicted of the vice.

None of this is new to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s government, which has developed a template for dealing with public anger over graft that essentially boils down to making symbolic offerings to appease it. Three years ago, when facing a similar public tantrum, Kenyatta announced that all implicated senior government officials would “step aside” till they cleared their names. No one really knows what “stepping aside” actually means – it is neither a resignation nor a suspension but it would appear the officials continue to draw a public salary. The “stepping aside” is then followed by prosecutions. However, there is a catch. Most graft prosecutions involve netting small fry dealing in relatively tiny amounts. Last week, for example, we learnt that a majority of the 57 cases prepared by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) involved the theft of under Sh10,000 (roughly US$100). And while it is true that senior officials involved in a Sh10 billion procurement scam at the National Youth Service have been charged in court, it is instructive to note that similar prosecutions in 2015 against 26 individuals involved in a remarkably similar Sh800 million heist at the same institution resulted in 23 acquittals.

Resignations that are not really resignations and prosecutions that are not really prosecutions. The truth is that Kenya’s war on corruption is really just a show, our very own version of Wag the Dog. What is going on here is the political class is using the cover of the corruption hysteria it has incited to settle scores. In the crosshairs is Kenyatta’s deputy, William Ruto, and his allies.

As the “handshake” between Kenyatta and his bitter rival, Raila Odinga, remakes Kenya’s political landscape, the Deputy President has found himself isolated and outmaneuvered and vulnerable in the scrap over who will succeed Kenyatta in 2022. However, even as they fight among themselves, the political elite are careful not to upset the cart. A fake corruption war can help get rid of rivals but all would lose if it was allowed to escalate into a real effort to stamp out the vice.

The truth is that Kenya’s war on corruption is really just a show, our very own version of Wag the Dog. What is going on here is the political class is using the cover of the corruption hysteria it has incited to settle scores. In the crosshairs is Kenyatta’s deputy, William Ruto, and his allies.

And this is what the rhetoric around prosecutions and “stepping aside” is designed to achieve. The privileging of resignations and convictions as the pre-eminent measures of success in the war against corruption allows the Executive to perversely claim to be more committed to fighting graft when more of its members are implicated in graft. Further, it allows the administration to scapegoat the Judiciary for failed prosecutions despite the fact that many of the cases presented in court are shoddily investigated and half-heartedly prosecuted.

More importantly, it means that Kenyatta can escape censure for not doing his job. Because the constitution secures the independence of the Director of Public Prosecutions, President Kenyatta can rightly disavow responsibility for the lack of convictions. But the singular focus on the fate of the so- called “big fish” has kept the public distracted from a much-needed conversation about reforming our governance systems to eliminate incentives and opportunities for graft. There is little in the way of a discussion on policy fixes to plug the leaks, which is Kenyatta’s actual job.

Lie detectors and other gimmicks

Take the Sh11 billion Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), an automated system for public financial management that has twice been gamed in almost identical fashion at the National Youth Service. It is even more stunning considering that, after the first scam, the Auditor- General had recommended specific reforms to IFMIS that were never implemented. Rather, by December 2016, at the very instance public attention was focused on the grilling of senior officials by Parliament and on prosecutions in the courts, the second scam was already under way.

Instead of offering policy solutions to systemic problems, Kenyatta has taken to introducing gimmicks like lie detector tests as well as to issuing Executive Orders that simply restate what the law already requires and which underscore the fact that it is not enforced. He has demanded that procurement officers submit wealth declarations, which they are already obligated to do every two years by the Public Officer Ethics Act. Most recently, he ordered all government entities to publish full details of tender awards, again as already required by the Access to Informationn Act.

But even as Kenyan media breathlessly report these “developments”, there is no questioning of why these laws weren’t enforced previously. If such questions were raised, Kenyans might begin to understand that the way the laws are designed defeats rather than achieves the goal of fighting corruption. For example, the requirement for wealth declarations, for example, is rendered nugatory by the fact that the declarations are by law kept secret, that the function of collecting the declarations is distributed across a number of bodies, and that there is no legal obligation placed on these bodies to verify or to audit the declarations.

However, instead of proposing the necessary changes to the legal regime to actually give it teeth, President Kenyatta has ordered a lifestyle audit of all public servants, again without detailing who exactly would carry it out and how they would do it. Rather than fix the systemic problems, the President is trying to make political hay.

The focus on prosecutions also misses the larger picture. Anti-corruption crusader and publisher of The Elephant, John Githongo, wrote in the e-Review that “corruption in Kenya isn’t about greedy procurement officers, fiddling civil servants, crooked businessmen, shady bankers, thieving politicians… these players are born of a system of politics and governance that is itself inherently corrupt; one in which the thieves and those who facilitate them thrive.” Understanding this is the key to solving the corruption riddle.

African gifts and other myths

Many times it has been suggested that graft is a cultural problem that grew out of a supposed “African” tradition of gift-giving. Now, it is a good practice to be sceptical every time someone uses the word “African” to imply a uniformity on the continent – and here a healthy dose of scepticism would be justified. As Joe Khamisi’s history of corruption, Looters and Grabbers: 54 Years of Corruption and Plunder by the Elite 1963-2017, demonstrates, corruption was the gift of colonialism. It was, and still is embedded into the very fabric of the state the British created. The logic of that state was to legitimise the stealing by the few from the many, a logic that was evinced through the state’s design.

In fact, Kenya was corrupted even before it became Kenya. By 1907, thirteen years before the territory officially became a colony, bribery was already a feature of the nascent state. Khamisi cites Hugh Cholmondeley, popularly known as Lord Delamere, a leader of the British settlers, describing the relations between the public and the new rulers: “Time and time, I have had a native say they were stopped by an Indian policeman. When I asked them how they got away, they always said, ‘Oh, I gave him something.’”

Khamisi also describes how corruption seeped from the white colonial establishment down to its African enforcers, the appointed chiefs and policemen. A state built to steal was itself peopled by thieves. As David Anderson says in Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, “Europeans were as guilty of corruption and malpractice in colonial Nairobi as anyone else, and Africans at the bottom of the colonial racial hierarchy were most often its victims.” The Rose Commission, which was established in 1955 to look into “alleged corruption or other malpractices in relation to the Affairs of the Nairobi City Council” found that “the practice of City Council servants demanding or accepting, and of contractors offering, bribes or, if you prefer, money presents for services rendered or to be rendered, [was] by no means uncommon”.

Corruption was baked into the state and its templates were established from early on. At the top, the white elite ripped off the state through public projects, such as the railway and the construction of public housing, while at the bottom, poorly paid chiefs, members of African courts and police supplemented their incomes by extorting from the people. As Khamisi puts it, citing David Leonard’s African Successes: Four Public Managers of Kenyan Rural Development, “Through corruption and bribery, chiefs were transformed into willing agents of colonialism and were implicitly encouraged to use their positions to amass wealth and demonstrate to all and sundry that it paid to cooperate with Europeans.” In this manner, corruption became institutionalised as a way of doing government business. And when those chiefs and their kids inherited the state from the British, they really did not know any other way to be.

Fixing systemic flaws

Following independence in 1963, the civil service was massively expanded. But the Jomo Kenyatta (Uhuru’s dad) administration was not keen on paying for it. Following the colonial model, in 1971 the Ndegwa Commission recommended allowing civil servants to supplement their wages with private business. This had the effect of legalising corruption and legitimising conflict of interest situations. The looting ramped up and it has been escalating ever since.

Understanding the systemic roots of corruption would allow Kenyans to see that successful prosecutions, while a necessary part of a credible anti-corruption strategy, will not fix he problem. Deterring and punishing the corrupt is no substitute for fixing a system that not only permits, but also rewards graft. Convictions, even in the unlikely event that meaningful ones are secured, would be ineffective so long as a third of the government’s budget, some Sh600 billion according to the EACC, continues to be available to be stolen every year.

Following the colonial model, in 1971 the Ndegwa Commission recommended allowing civil servants to supplement their wages with private business. This had the effect of legalising corruption and legitimising conflict of interest situations. The looting ramped up and it has been escalating ever since.

The fact is that the rewards of corruption far outstrip Kenya’s capacity to punish it. The country’s energies would be better spent in holding political leaders accountable, not just for delivering convictions and harsher sentences, but for shutting down the gravy train. And that will require reforming how the Kenyan state works.

Here we can take some lessons from the colonial times. A report from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights says that while the pre-independence civil service was corrupt, it “had its avarice kept to a minimum by the vigilance of the white settler community that it served”. If Kenya were serious about addressing corruption, ensuring that the public can effectively keep watch on the state should be at the top of the list. Everything from public contracts to wealth declarations should be exposed to the discerning gaze of the people.

And rather than token public participation in budget making, it is important to ensure that the public is involved in all aspects of decision making. As Nic Cheeseman wrote in 2015 on the subject: “The budget process can be understood to have three main stages when it comes to public participation: participatory budgeting, budget approval and communication, and budget review and audit. Ideally, participation should occur at all three stages, because public oversight is an important way to tackle both policy formation and corruption.”

Empowering the public to more actively participate in and oversee the affairs of the government will require a radical retrofitting of the colonial state. To date, Kenya’s second attempt at doing this seems to be going the way of the first. The 2010 constitution was in essence a reset to 1963 and the independence Constitution, which had many of the same features. However, that constitution failed largely because, as former Attorney General, Githu Muigai, wrote in 1982, it was imposed on an authoritarian, administrative structure. “Unhappily instead of the latter being amended to fit the former, the former was altered to fit the latter with the result that the constitution was effectively downgraded.”

That same colonial understructure is alive and well today, doing its best to undermine the operation of the new Constitution and its values of transparency and accountability. The biggest blow was to Chapter 6 of the Constitution that deals with leadership and integrity. This Chapter was effectively demolished when in the run-up to the 2013 election, a High Court ruled that Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto, two of the six Kenyans indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, could run for the office of the President and Deputy President of the Republic, respectively. It is, therefore, a cruel irony that Kenyatta is now demanding public officials indicted for corruption to do what he was himself unwilling to do then – step aside till he cleared his name.

Déjà vu

Sadly, it is not constitutionalism or respect for the law and for institutions that is driving Kenyatta’s anti-corruption rhetoric. It is not even concern over the looting of public funds; rather, this is a power grab. The President is seeking to substitute his will for the law. Officials step aside, or are prosecuted, not because the law requires it, but because the President ordered it. They are vetted, make wealth declarations and undergo lie detector tests for the same reason.

Under the veil of the anti-corruption drive, the President is actually conducting a campaign to delegitimise the constitution and concentrate power in himself. And if there is one thing our history teaches us, it is that this will not turn out well for the majority of Kenyans.

Beyond the President’s actions, Kenya has seen the demand for punishment used to undermine other constitutional protections. A significant one is the right to bail, which is today being presented as an extension of impunity. For a long time, Kenyans have been conditioned to equate arrest with both prosecution and punishment. In fact, during the Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi dictatorships, detention was itself used as punishment, not as a means to facilitate justice.

And, as a 2015 report by a judiciary task force on bail and bond guidelines found, “historically, police officers rarely grant cash bail to suspects of any offences other than traffic offences in spite of the provisions in the Constitution, C[riminal] P[rocedure] C[ode] and the Police Standing Orders which give discretionary powers to exercise that function.” Today, when people clamour for corruption suspects (and that’s all they are till convicted) to be denied their constitutional right to bail, many do not understand that they are eroding that same right for themselves and inviting the abuses of yore.

In the end, to effectively fight corruption, we must focus on systems and incentives, as well as uphold and strengthen, rather than undermine our institutions and laws.

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado

In the past, opening a bank account in Kenya was an elaborate and tedious affair. It was akin to applying for a job: you presented your “curriculum vitae” to bank officials who would determine your fitness as a financially serviceable client. There were forms to be filled (in duplicate) that captured details such as date of birth, schools attended, employment history, reasons for choosing that particular bank and referees to vouch for your suitability. Some banks even asked whether you had spent nights in a police cell and whether you had a criminal record. It was like joining an exclusive members’ club – the odious scrutiny made it look like it was a privilege to be allowed to join the “banking club”.

The procedure for getting a loan was even more stringent and punitive: you would be asked to deposit a valuable item, such as a log book, jewellery or a title deed, as collateral. Money matters were serious business.

That was then. Today technology, particularly smartphones, has revolutionised the financial sector, so much so that traditional banks must be ruing the day smartphones became second nature to humanity. These days getting a personal loan online is easier and faster than calling your nearest bank or micro-finance lending facility. Thanks to mobile banking, a smartphone owner can borrow from as little as Sh500 to as much as Sh70,000 without breaking into a sweat. All he or she needs is to be social media savvy. Having a social media account, such as a Facebook account, is understood by both the online loan apps and the borrowers to be an unstated primary requirement for accessing a loan. There are at least 50 mobile phone lending apps operating in Kenya.

A FinAcess (financial access) survey done in 2016 by the Central Bank of Kenya, the Kenyan National of Bureau of Statistics, FSD-Kenya and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor found out that 77.5 per cent of Kenyans own a mobile phone. Out of this group, according to a 2018 digital credit survey, 35 per cent, or roughly six million people, have taken at least one digital loan. In essence, the survey found that digital credit had become a leading source of credit in Kenya. Using a sample size of 3,000 Kenyans, the survey showed that digital credit appeals to younger customers, out of which 55 per cent are male and from urban areas. The study also found that by far the most common reason for taking a loan is to meeting day-to-day needs. Financing education also drives use of credit while just over a quarter of users take loans to support their business and agricultural activities.

However, many of these borrowers struggle to pay back their loans. According to a survey by Microsave, a financial services consultancy, 2.7 million borrowers have been negatively listed by the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) in the last three years, 15 percent of them for amounts of less than Sh200. (CRB is the body charged with the task of flagging or blacklisting all loan defaulters and ensuring that they are barred from borrowing from or transacting with any financial and legal entity, including the government.)

Eliud Njoroge, a financial risk management and private equity fund consultant, told me that mobile phone lending firms financed by venture capitalists were taking advantage of the vulnerability of impressionable youth. “The youth of today want instant gratification – they want it now and here. The notion of delayed gratification, that is, the idea of being patient and thinking through your financial needs, wants, opportunity costs and apparent risk considerations are alien concepts to them,” said Njoroge. “The ‘Java’ generation lives for the moment and developers of these digital apps are exploiting this social phenomenon in the epoch of social media, where the imagined reality of life is being played instantly.” (By Java generation the private equity fund manager, who himself is a millennial, was alluding to the Java restaurants in Nairobi that are popular among the city’s slick young urbanites.)

According to a survey by Microsave, a financial services consultancy, 2.7 million borrowers have been negatively listed by the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) in the last three years, 15 percent of them for amounts of less than Sh200.

“The crux of the matter is that today the aggressive marketing gimmicks by the owners of these apps are singularly directed at the post-millennials – guys barely out of their teens and who have zilch idea of what constitutes a financial budget, leave alone a plan,” notes Njoroge. “Because they still solely rely on their parents, guardians, benefactors, relatives and friends for their upkeep, they have no qualms misusing and squandering money. Hence, the apps have specifically been developed largely with this group of people in mind. They are ready and willing to spend, but most importantly, borrow money to feed their peer-driven lifestyle habits.”

Njoroge’s opinion is based on his wide experience in advising multinational banks and international financial corporations and, more specifically, financial start-up companies that are being funded to loan cash to young people (read anybody below 33 years of age). Njoroge has worked as a financial risk management consultant in Ethiopia, Rwanda and the United Kingdom. Now based in Kenya, he currently works with start-up companies on the look-out for potential big and small loan risk takers. “I will tell you for free that these online apps will explicitly not come out to state that they are targeting these young adults, but I know it from experience and interactions with today’s bankers and venture capitalists that this is the case.”

However, the 2018 digital credit survey found that “digital borrowers are more likely than average to run their own business or be employed” and “less likely to be … dependent on family or government transfers”.

Njoroge says that the apps make young people believe that they can both save and borrow money, but this is not the case. “There is no saving. The apps exist solely for ensuring that you borrow endlessly.” He says another lie being perpetrated by these apps is that they promote small business enterprises. “A complete lie. These apps would like to masquerade as micro-finance entities. They like to market themselves as tools that reduce the cost of borrowing through technology. But I can tell you for a fact that micro-financing is a different financial ball game, technology or no technology. If indeed there are times when they will provide loans for micro-financing, it is because they must be seen to do so, and therefore, it will be incidental and not the primary intended goal.”

The tragedy of these apps, says the financial consultant, is that the cost of repaying these loans can be very punitive. “Firstly, their interest rates are way above the rates charged by banks. The Java generation is impervious to these high interest rates – they borrow and spend money that they have not sweated for. The developers of these apps figured this a long time ago.”

In addition, “if today you default, your name is immediately forwarded to the CRB. If that happens, trust me, you will not even be allowed to borrow from Okoa Jahazi (a platform for borrowing airtime from Safaricom, the biggest mobile network provider in Kenya).”

CRB has to date blacklisted half a million people, according to the Transunion Credit Bureau’s CEO, Billy Owino, Just three years ago, there were only 150,000 loan defaulters in Kenya. Woe unto you if you are ever blacklisted. You are not off the hook even after you have repaid your loan. CRB still considers you a credit risk for seven years. What this means is that for seven years financial institutions will be wary of you when you approach them for a loan. “Most of the borrowers don’t know that they got blacklisted. We get 200 calls daily from individuals in this category, asking how they ended up in the blacklist.”

Twenty-year-old Charles, a University of Nairobi student, says that he took the trouble to compare the interest rates of the various online money lending apps. He eventually settled for KCB-M-Pesa because it had the best rates.” He says that on average he borrows between Sh2,000 and 3,000 twice a month.

“What do you borrow the money for?” I asked him. “I use the money to finance my Sport-Pesa (gambling) expeditions. I bet for big matches.” Although Charles is a college student, he has not yet outgrown indulging in play-station games. “Apart from betting, I also borrow money to afford my play-station games escapades.”

The digital credit survey found that only 3 per cent of borrowers get a loan in order to gamble. It is possible that this number is an underestimate given the finding that “digital borrowers are almost twice as likely to have tried mobile betting at least once in their lifetime”.

Sports betting

Sports betting has become big business in Kenya and ensnared an entire generation. A GeoPoll survey done in March 2017 found that 76 percent of young people in Kenya are into betting and that these youth spend more money on betting than their Ugandan and Tanzanian counterparts. The survey also identified mobile phones as the preferred tool for sports betting among young people.

Read also: BETTING THEIR LIVES AWAY: How online gambling is ruining Kenyan youth

SportPesa, a sports gaming company that was established about five years ago, is today the biggest sports betting platform in Kenya. It is among the dozen or so sports gaming companies that have sprouted in the country recently. These sports gaming companies have developed an impassioned craze among millennials and zillennials (the post-millennial teenage youth born after 2000) who have taken to betting as a way of life. The GeoPoll survey found that Kenyans gambled more frequently than their fellow Africans, spending an average of Sh5,000 a month. Charles has yet to win big cash (most people have never won more than Sh5,000) but feels that he has to keep on feeding his craving, which started as a hobby.

A GeoPoll survey done in March 2017 found that 76 percent of young people in Kenya are into betting and that these youth spend more money on betting than their Ugandan and Tanzanian counterparts. The survey also identified mobile phones as the preferred tool for sports betting among young people.

According to Banker Awards held in the UK in December 2017, Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) is the largest bank countrywide in terms of asset size and has 12 million customers registered for the KCB- M-Pesa mobile service. The KCB M-Pesa loan app, which started in 2015 as a savings account, charges between 4 per cent and 6 per cent interest rate. Its phone loan service rose from 35 per cent between January and March 2016 to 41 per cent in the same quarter in 2017. Because of the success of mobile money borrowing, financial transactions at the branch level fell to 20 per cent from 31 per cent previously. Said KCB Group CEO and Managing Director, Joshua Oigara, in an in- house 2017 KCB newsletter: “We’ve seen a sharp rise in loan requests on all our mobile loans following the decrease in interest rates.” The newsletter stated that the average value of loans per customer was Sh1,800.

Like Branch International Inc., an international online money lending consortium that has its headquarters in San Francisco in California, and which launched its services in Kenya in 2015, KCB M-Pesa, vigorously advertises on Classic FM’s most popular morning radio show. Its target audience, just like Branch’s, is post-millennial youth who have just turned 18, who are college-bound and who have just acquired a national identity card. Branch is giving loans of up to Sh70,000, and according to the radio promos, it claims to have up to a million Kenyan borrowers. “You do not need any collateral, any bank account or a referee, all you need to do is download the Android app and you will receive your loan in 10 seconds flat,” proclaims the ad. The advertising language used to sell the online borrowing apps is deliberate and intentional, targeted at a generation that is just starting to discover itself and excited about owning a gadget that, to them, seems to unlock hitherto unimagined infinite possibilities. The one-minute radio promos of these online lending apps are couched in language that would appeal to young adults. “Unlocking your growth potential” and other slogans are targeted at a generation that had little or no financial knowledge.

Ken, like Charles, borrows to finance his gambling habits. “So I will borrow every time there are big matches being played on the English Premier League,” admitted Ken. “I bet on Sport-Pesa and I borrow between Sh1,500 to 3,000. He said his favourite app was Tala because, “it is very prompt when relaying the money. I wanted an app that does not waste time in giving me instant cash.”

Dates and other emergencies

The online app of choice for 19-year-old Steve, a Technical University of Nairobi student, is M- Shwari. “I opted to use M-Shwari because it is a solid brand that works together with KCB, another solid brand.” Steve said he borrows between Sh1,000 and 3,000 a month to finance his college lifestyle habits. “Cut a brother some slack,” he said. “I need to enjoy some good life while I’m a student.” Steve said he relies on his parents for pocket money “but can what they give me be enough? I oftentimes have to deal with emergencies, hence the need to have a channel where you can quickly run to for fast cash.” These “emergencies” include impressing and winning over impromptu dates.

Steve told me it is not just once that he did not have the cash to entertain some girl in a fancy restaurant. “On several occasions I have had hot dates, but trust me, I did not have a penny. But tell me, would you let slip a date you’ve been chasing like there’s no tomorrow just because you’re not liquid?”

Steve said he relies on his parents for pocket money “but can what they give me be enough? I oftentimes have to deal with emergencies, hence the need to have a channel where you can quickly run to for fast cash.” These “emergencies” include impressing and winning over impromptu dates.

Steve said he has walked confidently into a Java restaurant a couple of times with a “beautiful catch” with not a single penny in his pocket because he knows he can borrow money from M-Shwari “of course, without her knowledge”. The instant loan is deposited into his M-Pesa account, which he uses to settle his bill. Meanwhile, the Java generation belle will not have the slightest hint that her expensive lunch treat was financed by a loan and that the young man will have to figure out how to repay it later.

By 2017, the M-Shwari (shwari means to be calm or peaceful in Kiswahili) online loan portfolio had 420,000 applications every day; of that, 70,000 are processed daily for repayment every 30 days. It has more than 80,000 agents countrywide and processes US$20 million daily payments, according to a study done by Tamara Cook and Claudia McKay. M-Shwari is operated by Safaricom, the biggest mobile network operator in Kenya, and is considered to be the mother of mobile phone lending apps, largely because it was the first mobile phone loan application in Kenya.

Started in 2012, M-Shwari has to date 21 million customers in Kenya. The minimum threshold required of an M-Shwari borrower is to possess a Safaricom sim card and to be registered as an M- Pesa user. Therefore, technically speaking, anyone with an M-Pesa account qualifies to borrow from M-Shwari. The beauty with M-Shwari, its users tell me, is that you can borrow offline so long as you are on the M-Pesa platform. M-Shwari charges a one-time “service fee” of 7.5 per cent on all loans.

M-Shwari is actually a creation of a partnership between Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) and Safaricom, who split the revenue accrued from the lucrative business. According to the How M- Shwari Works: The Story So Far report written by Tamara Cook and Claudia McKay in 2015, Safaricom provides access to customers and transactional data on mobile phone and mobile money usage. CBA, on the other hand, develops credit scoring algorithms that analyse the transactional data to make credit evaluation decisions. The actual lending is done by the bank. One of the single biggest reasons why the M-Shwari app is preferred is because money is promptly credited to your phone immediately. But just as you receive money on the spot, you must also pay it back on time. Deferment and delayed payment can be costly and punitive. “I have always endevoured to pay back on time,” said Steve.

According to a Safaricom manager, M-Shwari is busiest from 3am to 5am and from 8.30pm to 10.30pm, not because of the nocturnal spending habits of young men like Steve, but because of the business acumen of women vegetable hawkers (known as mama mboga). From as early as 3 in the morning, the women vegetable sellers begin to borrow money from M-Shwari because they need to go their respective markets to buy their wares, fresh and in good time. These women are experts in M-Shwari borrowing. By the evening, when they are reconciling their figures, they will begin repaying their loan, usually from between 8.30pm and 10.30pm, in preparation for the dawn borrowing. The women borrow anything from between Sh3,000 and Sh5,000 daily. On a good day, the mama mboga will repay her M-Shwari debt and still remain with a tidy sum as profit. However, these women, who are M-Shwari’s most loyal customers, are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to paying back their loans.

Chebet, a student at the University of Nairobi, does not even care to know the interest rates charged by these mobile phone apps. She told me that she borrows between Sh1,500 and Sh3,000 per month. And she was very forthright on why she borrows the money: “I borrow to satisfy my spendthrift behaviours. I am always buying shoes, bags and clothes that my meagre allowance that I am allowed by my parents cannot satiate.”

The 19-year-old said her favourite borrowing app is Tala. “I got used to Tala because it is advertised a lot on mobile smartphones. Tala is truly one of the money-lending apps that is advertised 24/7 on Android smartphones. The pop-ups are constantly in your face every time you navigate through the phone.” (Tala was previously known as Mkopo Rahisi, Kiswahili for “easy loan.” The app has devised a system where it rewards referrals: for every person you recommend Tala to, you are paid Sh200. Users of Tala, nonetheless, have to part with an additional charge in the form of M-Pesa transaction fees because the app uses a Pay Bill number. I asked her whether she paid her debts in time; she said she had defaulted a couple of times.

Tasha, like Chebet, has no clue how much interest rate she is charged by Tala. Blandly honest, the 20-year-old student told me she told me she borrows “to buy myself make-ups.” Hence, every three months she will borrow between Sh1,500 and Sh3,000 from Tala.

Tala, which was started in March 2014 by Shivani Siroya, a former United Nations employee, began by dishing out Sh10,000 loans in Kenya; today it gives loans worth up to Sh50,000. The app has the highest interest rate among its competitors – between 11 per cent and 15 per cent. (Branch charges 8.4 per cent.) Tala charges 11 per cent if you pay your loan weekly and 15 per cent if you choose to pay monthly.

Tala has also come up with a system that can detect when customers change their mobile phone number. It has a default message that reads: “Your account is linked to another device.” It is a polite warning from Tala that it would be improper and risky to run away with their money, for example, thinking that by changing your sim card, you will be off the hook insofar as repaying your loan is concerned. Chebet, in not too many words, confirmed to me Tala’s tightening of its lending procedures: “You can run, but you cannot escape.”

Mariam, another 19-year-old, is hooked to Tala. Although not a spendthrift like Chebet, she nevertheless said a good thing will not pass her simply because she cannot afford it. “That’s why these apps came about; to be rescuing some of us when we are stuck.” Getting stuck often means not being able to do things, like going to concerts with your peers, because you don’t have the money. “The first time I borrowed money from my phone was when there was a big music show in town and I just could not afford to miss it. All my friends were going there. How could I be left behind?” Mariam uploaded the Tala app and in the blink of an eye she had money in her M-Pesa account. “I resorted to Tala because it’s really advertised on the phone, plus my friends invited me to use it.” Mariam says Tala’s interest rates are high, yet she opted to stick and continue using the app because she finds it convenient. She borrows between Sh1,000 and 2000 every month.

In an interview she had with the Business Daily in January, Siroya said that Tala’s association with the M-Pesa platform had given her company access to 27 million users. Worldwide Tala has given out 4.5 million loans worth Sh25 billion to clients in the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya and Tanzania. Ninety-five per cent of her clients are repeat customers.

George, 20, a student at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology (JKUAT), was as candid as a college student can be. “What do you borrow the money for?” I asked. “To finance dates at fancy restaurants that I know very well I can hardly afford with my own meagre cash.” George also said he borrows to patronise expensive pubs, which ordinarily he would not afford. “How often do you borrow?” Often enough was his curt answer. “Which app do you usually use?” The student said he does not have a specific app and therefore did not also care to find out their respective interest rates. “I will use any as long as it gets the job done. But I have noticed, by and large, I tend to rely mostly on Tala and M-Shwari.” I also asked him whether he repays the loans, if at all. “I do, although I am always falling behind schedule.”

Just like her fellow college mate George, Barbara, 19, a student at the University of Nairobi, does not care about interest rates. “All that I care for is there is money coming my way.” She said she borrows “to get through to the end of the month, as well as to buy my writing books for assignments after squandering my allocated pocket that my parents give me for every month.” Barbara said she religiously borrows between Sh1,000 and Sh2,000 every month. “I use Tala simply because of peer influence – many of my friends use it and they recommended it to me.”

Perhaps it is because of his age that I found Joe’s reason for resorting to the online borrowing money apps reassuring. Joe is 21 and has almost completed his studies at JKUAT. He therefore is already thinking about what he will do after exiting college. He currently runs a mitumba (secondhand clothes) business, selling contemporary clothing to his fellow students. So when I asked him what he borrows the money for, he promptly told me that he borrows it to replenish his stock and to keep his business afloat,“because oftentimes, I’m not paid on time by my customers”. Every month he borrows a standard Sh2,000 from Tala, which he repays promptly. Chomba, also a university student, borrowed just once because he had a real emergency. His sister’s child, who he was looking after when he was on recess, became sick and needed urgent treatment. “I had heard about KCB-M-Pesa and its reasonable interest rates, so I downloaded the app and borrowed Sh4,000. I later opened an account with KCB.”

Njoroge, the financial expert, pointed out to me that online loans are approved on the basis of the applicant’s reputation, “what they call reputational collateral”. Reputational collateral is dependent on such habits as how many times you make your calls and how often you transact on your M-Pesa account. “The apps’ engineers have developed algorithms that compile your personal data: your social media activities – the kind of Facebook messages you post, your type of friends, how many there are, the sites you like visiting, among other analytics.” He said all this was part of the data analytics that CRB also collects on individuals’ financial habits, which CRB uses to advise whoever requires the data.”

Danson Muchemi, CEO of Jambo Pay, the IT company that collects revenue on behalf of Nairobi County, especially revenue relating to parking charges, praises the online borrowing apps “because they brought down banking barriers. There is no more profiling. The technology has enabled the creation of ‘digital assets’ that approximates what type of a person you are. Armed with this information, the apps are able to sketch your character and identify your spending habits, needs and wants, even though there is a thin line that separates the two.”

“The apps’ engineers have developed algorithms that compile your personal data: your social media activities – the kind of Facebook messages you post, your type of friends, how many there are, the sites you like visiting, among other analytics.” He said all this was part of the data analytics that CRB also collects on individuals’ financial habits, which CRB uses to advise whoever requires the data.”

Unlike the banks, which depended on your “CV” to arrive at a decision about whether or not they will advance you a loan, the power of technology is such that it can, with near precision, detect whether or not you will be a defaulter. By analysing your social media profile, the apps can sum up your personality and your willingness or ability to pay back. “Technology, as opposed to traditional banking methods, which took ages deciding on whether you qualify for a bank loan or not, allows mobile banking financiers to make that decision fast and instantly.”

“Old habits die hard” is an English idiom that explains acquired habits that later become difficult to get rid of. When a loan is just a click away, it is not hard to imagine a future where online borrowing will become a habit, or maybe even a harmful addiction, among Kenyans.

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 Gado 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.

Catching the big Fish!

By Gado In late February this year, eight individuals were charged in Tanzania with the horrific murder of Wayne Lotter, an anti-poaching investigator who was killed in August last year. The targeted execution of the renowned conservationist and founder of the PAMS Foundation exposed just how far poaching networks can go to protect their criminal trade – estimated to be the fourth most lucrative form of transnational crime globally. His murder also likely reflected the success of his organisation’s investigations and its partnership with the Tanzanian serious crimes investigation unit.

Over the past four years, the serious crimes investigative unit had arrested nearly 900 poachers and ivory traders in Tanzania, leading to more than 240 successful prosecutions and several long prison sentences. When the UK hosts the fourth illegal wildlife trade conference in October this year, other countries can learn from Tanzania’s political leadership, inter-agency cooperation and use of financial tools in tackling poaching and other forms of criminal wildlife trade.

While Africa may be the frontline in the fight against ivory poaching, what lies behind the images of slain elephants is a sophisticated, international network of criminals whose leaders all too often operate with impunity. Anti-money laundering deterrence measures and financial investigation techniques need to be prioritised in order to trace the money and topple the ivory kingpins that continue to threaten rare and precious wildlife.

The tools needed to do that are similar to tackling other forms of organised crime, be it drugs, human trafficking or other mafia-style enterprises. Tracing the money helps identify accomplices of those who are caught red-handed, together with their ringleaders. It can identify laundered assets and property, track the movement of individuals, link suspects to criminality and play a critical role in successful convictions. While Africa may be the frontline in the fight against ivory poaching, what lies behind the images of slain elephants is a sophisticated, international network of criminals whose leaders all too often operate with impunity.

The trade in illegal wildlife products is driven by profit; some estimates put the price of rhino horn by weight to be higher than cocaine or gold. Demand in consumer markets, particularly in China, needs to be addressed but simultaneously we must fundamentally change the cost-benefit equation for criminal leaders and drive them out of business.

As well as raising the cost of killing and shipping ivory, for instance, authorities can increase the risks of depositing, moving, storing and spending the resulting criminal profits. The scale of the trade in illegal wildlife is such that criminals rely on formal financial systems to launder their money – through banks, money exchanges or mobile-based transfers. This makes them vulnerable to deterrence, regulation and detection.

Deterrence

There are three strategies the governments and law enforcement agencies can employ to deter would-be poachers who want to launder their money. These are the foundations of our European Union-funded programme to help ten East African countries to prevent money laundering and terrorist funding.

Read also: BROKE AND BROKEN: How Money Laundering Ruins Lives

First, we must better understand the specific methods and channels used by poachers and launderers and tighten up loopholes. That may mean financial investigators working closely with emerging mobile money transfer systems, which are known to facilitate cash flow at the lower end of the poaching trade. Some of this is about day-to-day work spotting suspicious money transfers and verifying customer identities.

Second, it is about increasing the threat of being caught, convicted and financially punished. Often it is only the lower level poachers and traders that are convicted in Africa but when ivory smuggling leader Feisal Mohammed was jailed for 20 years in 2016, following cooperation between Tanzanian and Kenyan authorities, it sent shock waves throughout the poaching world. We are seeing this sort of cross-border leadership and persistence growing in East Africa but more needs to be done.

Third, authorities can increase the costs of being caught as well as its likelihood. Forfeiture of assets is key to ensuring crime does not pay. While most East African countries have instituted stiffer penalties for both poaching and money laundering, asset seizure is rare. As well as putting the criminals under pressure, the money systems on which they depend can be held responsible. Kenya’s three private banks that were fined, albeit in small amounts, for not reporting suspicious transactions after $7.7 million was embezzled from Kenya’s National Youth Service incentivises the financial sector to tighten its checks.

Often it is only the lower level poachers and traders that are convicted in Africa but when ivory smuggling leader Feisal Mohammed was jailed for 20 years in 2016, following cooperation between Tanzanian and Kenyan authorities, it sent shock waves throughout the poaching world.

Detection Too often in East Africa the interception of an ivory shipment and capture of low-level poachers is the end rather than the beginning of an investigation. The successful case against Feisal Mohammed, which involved mobile phone data as evidence, shows the role that companies can play in identifying its customers as criminals even when they are far from the site of a slain rhino.

The criminal wildlife trade and ivory trafficking, in particular, can cross over with other transnational organised crime. For instance, the Akasha brothers, who were extradited from Kenya and charged in the United States with being ringleaders of a major heroin smuggling network, were also linked to 30 tons of ivory seizures. That case, which involved extensive undercover operations by US investigators, shows that financial investigators need to be well-resourced and led. Some East African countries’ financial investigation units are too small and under-resourced for the scale of the criminal economy they are mandated to uncover. Nevertheless, there are opportunities for having a greater impact if investigators join forces across borders.

Some investigators have limited authority to extract confidential data from financial institutions, or lack the knowledge about to exercise their powers. In particular, investigators in Africa often fail to treat wildlife crime as a serious, organised crime, which hampers its investigation and disruption.

The former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, compared financial information and forensic accounting to the impact fingerprints and DNA samples have on criminal investigations. In the lead- up to this year’s London conference on wildlife crime, there is an opportunity to focus attention on using these tools with greater effect to disrupt a global problem.

Money laundering and related organised crime, such as wildlife crime, is by its very nature impossible to accurately quantify. Recent estimates have put the economy of money laundering at between 2% and 5% of global GDP, or in the trillions of US dollars. Concentrated in certain sectors in some countries, money laundering can undermine investments, jobs and economic growth.

In poaching, the damage to people and animals and the scale of profits involved are all too visible. The sight of bloody carcasses of elephants and heaps of seized ivory reflects the cost to African wildlife and how the sale of too many countries’ national treasures continues to profit just a few.

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.