Cost of corruption rises for donor-dependent Kenya

Morris Walunywa is unemployed.So his older brothers, who wanted to help find him a job at the prison, did the natural thing: They pooled their meager savings of $65 and bribed the prison's chief officer to give Mr. Morris a job. The officer pocketed the money, promising to enroll Morris. But when the list of recruits was later posted, it didn't include Mr. Walunywa's name.

"This is normal. Everyone is corrupt, and we play by those rules," says eldest brother George Walunywa. "You cannot expect anything here without a kitu kidogo.

In Swahili, kitu kidogo means "a little something." The culture it reflects is endemic in Kenya. A kitu kidogo is required by everyone from school headmasters to politicians. But the problem appears to be catching up to Kenya, which is regularly ranked as one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world.

Last month, a proposal came before Parliament that would have established an independent anticorruption authority, and entrenched it in the Constitution. President Daniel arap Moi personally showed up in the Parliament house to lobby for it. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank - tired of having their funding siphoned into personal accounts - had conditioned $317 million in aid on the passage of the bill. But the bill failed, because reformers said it was not strict enough.

It was just the latest high-profile failure to handle a problem that analysts say could devastate Kenya's economy, the most important in eastern Africa.

Kenya's donor-dependent economy is already plagued by dwindling private investment and increasing capital flight. The economy is in the worst recession since its 1963 independence, and last year actually shrank by 0.3 percent. The loss of the IMF's $317 million, along with the investor confidence that comes with the IMF endorsement, is a massive blow to the economy.

"Failure to stem corruption will lead Kenya down a slippery slope," warns Mehdi Drissi, a French diplomat in Nairobi. "The IMF's departure will be followed by an exodus of multinationals and professionals. Infrastructure will further deteriorate, doctors will leave, the level of teachers in the education system will go down, and common people will become more demoralized."

But fighting corruption is proving to be difficult - in great part because those taking on the fight are the very same people benefiting most from corruption.

"The linkage here between power and wealth is very, very clear," says John Githongo, head of the Kenya chapter of Transparency International, a corruption watchdog group. "The majority of the richest people in this country are all ex-politicians or ex-soldiers ... which means that when you are messing with corruption, you are messing with the leaders."

The original Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACA) was created in 1997, soon after the Public Accounts Committee revealed that $10 billion in public funds was lost between 1994 and 1995, including funds from the Central Bank, the state-run postal and telecommunications corporation, and Kenya Railways.

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