From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Jul 01 2009 - 06:15:39 EDT
Kenya's decline and fall
The streets are no longer burning, but smouldering corruption at every level
of government threatens to rip the country apart. Once the pride of East
Africa, it has now been judged a failure of a state, writes Daniel Howden
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Symbols rarely come as obvious or appropriate as Nairobi's Integrity Centre.
A stone's throw from State House Avenue, the headquarters of Kenya's
Anti-Corruption Commission (Kacc) is both a rusting hulk and a public joke.
It was built to project the arrival of a brash new world but its metal
panels have oxidised and bled, scarring its bronze facade with rivulets like
the tracks of filthy brown tears.
In a country so traumatised by the consequences of corruption this ought to
be a hive of activity. Instead it is a place which most experts would be
happy to see closed. "They should be locked in and paid to stay there," says
Mwalimu Mati, an anti-corruption campaigner. "They're not ever going to
fight grand corruption. They are managers of scandal and no action is ever
taken."
The Kacc is not the exception, it is the rule. Kenya is replete with
commissions and authorities, hollow institutions that the ruling elite has
long known how to manipulate when using "process" to paralyse reform.
Eighteen months after East Africa's island of stability was brought to the
brink of civil war by the fallout from a stolen election, there is a
temptation to assume that if the country is not burning, it must be healing.
That would be wrong, according to the annual index of failed states, issued
yesterday, which put Kenya in the critically failed group, one place below
Burma.
The appearance at 14th in the respected rankings compiled by the US-based
Fund for Peace has shocked some in Nairobi but others are clear where the
failures lie. "If a state exists to provide security, maintain its borders,
provide food and a system of arbitration, then you can make the case that
Kenya doesn't do those things," says Mr Mati.
The bloated unity government that emerged from the violence is not helping.
Remarkably, there is only one MP in parliament who was left outside of
government, a situation that has left the job of opposition to foreign
envoys. "There was real hope that we'd get a new Kenya. That has not
happened," is the verdict of one Western diplomat. "There are no political
hopes out there. There is no one with a clean pair of hands."
Foreign aid supplies roughly eight per cent of Kenya's budget but using that
leverage to bring change is complicated by venal politicians, the diplomat
argue. "If we pull that money, it means no bore holes in Garissa, it doesn't
hit them [the politicians]."
While the daily theatre of scandals, meetings and reconciliations in the
unity government dominates the Kenyan papers, the symptoms of an
extraordinary crisis are present just beneath the surface.
The rule of law is collapsing and the UN has accused the police of a wave of
extra-judicial killings. Watchdogs say the grand coalition has launched a
"feeding frenzy" of corruption. International agencies are feeding
one-quarter of the population. An ethnic criminal sect, the Mungiki, is in
open war for the Central Province. And there has been no progress on any of
the keystones of the 2008 peace plan brokered by Kofi Annan.
While these crises multiply, corruption is all that holds the government
together, according to John Githongo, Kenya's most famous whistleblower.
"The glue is greed," he explains. He predicts the government will hold
together for only as long as it takes rivals to build up "big enough war
chests" to literally fight all over again.
The cosy consensus voiced by the Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, that "Kenya
looked over the edge of the abyss and stepped back," is wishful thinking,
according to Michela Wrong, the British writer whose critique of Kenya's
ruling elite, It's Our Turn To Eat, has been effectively banned from
bookshops.
Interest in her book - which charts the recent history of the former British
colony through Mr Githongo's story and argues that high-level corruption
destabilised the country - is such that an underground movement has been set
up to get it out to the public. Four hundred people turned up to hear a
reading from the book at the National Theatre, the podcast of which is now a
popular Kenyan download.
The book drive is evidence of the interest of ordinary Kenyans in finding
out about the history of looting of the state coffers by their political
leaders. The Goldenberg scandal of the 1990s which cost the country at least
10 per cent of gross domestic product found a sequel in the Anglo Leasing
scandal under the so-called anti-corruption administration of Mwai Kibaki.
Efforts to punish the guilty and recover the lost millions have in both
cases frozen.
The consequences for the rest of the region of an outright failure in Kenya
were brought home during the post-election fighting that killed more than
1,500 people last year, when fuel prices in Uganda and Rwanda went up nearly
20 per cent.
The Waki Commission, appointed to identify the culprits behind the political
violence has long since delivered its report. But the names it contains
remain hidden and the deadline for setting up a local tribunal has passed,
raising the prospect of government leaders being taken before the
International Criminal Court.
Mr Githongo has said that the only cause for optimism is that the grand
coalition is proving to all of Kenya's 42 tribes that having their
respective "ethnic baron" in power does not improve their lives. He hopes
this could break the mould which has seen elections amount to little more
than a periodic ethnic census.
Meanwhile, the political void is exacerbating Kenya's tendency to look for
"political messiahs", Mr Mati argues. Mr Githongo, the former graft tsar who
worked for the current president for two years before fleeing to London with
a caseload of evidence of grand corruption, is even being touted as one of
them.
Back in Kenya and working as a consultant, Mr Githongo has been engaging in
what he calls "conversations with the grassroots" across the country. An
editorial in The Nation said the effort to circulate Wrong's book was a new
political movement.
Murithi Mutiga, a younger political commentator in Nairobi, is part of a
generation that everyone hopes will find a way out of the crisis. He
believes the country has come to resemble the banks that have shaken the
global financial system. "Kenya is in the curious position of qualifying to
be a failed state but for the big Western powers, it's too important to
fail."
The telephone directory of Kenya's non-government organisations weighs
enough to remind anyone that Nairobi is the region's hub. It is the UN's
third most important base after New York and Geneva and hosts the region's
largest US diplomatic mission. Nairobi's elite and the international agency
staffers, known as "two-yearers", are living in what Mutiga calls an
"imaginary stability".
Not many people here perceive themselves to be living in a failed state. And
yet "Kenya is a failing state", in his view. And it was this complacency
that prompted the shocked response to the Kenya's descent into violence last
year.