Why it won't be easy for Kenya to slay monster of corruption

The Kenyan government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were scheduled to meet this February to agree on a governance strategy to address systemic corruption that constrains economic growth. According to media reports, the IMF has made it abundantly clear Kenya government must come up with a credible anti-corruption plan to qualify for additional aid.

While every effort to end endemic corruption is welcome, Kenya’s problem has never been about coming up with credible policy papers, but rather implementing the recommendations.

Kenya’s history of producing brilliant reports whose findings are rarely implemented is well-documented. Besides the Auditor General and the Controller of Budget, many recommendations by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission are never prosecuted. Similarly, there are many reports by ad hoc committees to look into grand corruption scandals that never see the light of day, besides all the fanfare. Findings in many of these reports are never implemented, especially whenever they touch on powerful figures or their political networks.

Given our dismal track record of following up on recommendations, I would not hold my breath that even an IMF-inspired report will be implemented. Overwhelming evidence shows our anti-corruption effort does not fail for lack of credible reporting but for lack of political will to act on recommendations.

It follows then that if the IMF wants strategies to address endemic corruption, some thought must go into strategising on how to correct a culture that encourages politicians to seek power for self-enrichment. This attitude has been dubbed ‘my turn to eat’ because people seek public office to enrich themselves like their predecessors.  

Historically, my turn to eat culture goes back to the handover of the state machinery to Africans at independence. For many who suffered under the colonial system, opportunities in government were considered just compensation for the persecution during the liberation struggle.

The sense of entitlement to the fruits of independence is illustrated in a classic case where a Cabinet minister walked into a showroom and drove off with a brand new Mercedes without paying. This pervasive sense of entitlement was also manifest in a famous episode where the founding father berated a fellow member of the Kapenguria Six for failing to take advantage of government largesse. 

Besides the strong sense of entitlement to state largesse, another factor that contributed to corruption was the vast difference between the attitude of colonial administrators and their African successors. For British subjects, being an employee in Her Majesty’s Service was a great honour that demanded service with distinction and dedication. The sense of patriotic duty displayed by expatriates was, however, lacking in Africans who entered a civil service that was widely associated with colonial exploitation.

The lack of connection to the system engendered a perfect breeding ground for corruption, given the enormous opportunities and responsibilities bestowed on the incoming administration. By any standard, such a tumultuous transition period was fraught with opportunities for rent seeking due to weak controls and oversight networks.  

Socially, Africanisation of the civil service birthed a wealthy class of bureaucrats whose lifestyle and opulence set new standards and social status. The spectacular transformation of the villagers to urban elites demonstrated a strong correlation between access to government resources and personal and ethnic prosperity. To this date, many believe joining the government is a direct route to unprecedented wealth for individuals and their communities. This belief has been inculcated in the minds of the citizens through decades of populist politics that associate gaining power with ethnic and individual prosperity.

Since structural adjustment programmes started in the ‘80s, the IMF has sought to create efficiency in the economy through neo-liberal policies that require governments to divest from sectors that can be done better by the private sector. Besides efficiency, such policies also aim to reduce ills like corruption by reducing opportunities for rent seeking. Currently, this neo-liberalism is discernible in the Kenyan government’s efforts to divest from parastatals and to cut back on government investment in social programmes such as higher education and health.

While cutting the size of government is a time-tested conservative economic strategy, structural adjustment prescriptions are often ignored in emerging democracies because of the attendant political risks. Since economic prescriptions cannot work optimally in the absence of political will, the IMF's attention should shift to influencing public views about the role of government in an economy.

Some of the strategies can include support for a recent proposal in Parliament to introduce a curriculum on patriotism in primary education. At the university level, curriculum on patriotism can incorporate modules in liberalism that helps student to understand the relationship between politics, philosophy, and economics. In short, IMF efforts should now focus on closing a gap that emerged at independence, where we adopted a capitalist hardware without the operating software.