The transnational corporations which corrupt the Western leaders are the same ones which dominate Third World economies.

Almost all American presidents since the War have been cited in a huge scandal. Often involved is a private corporation seeking political patronage to gain illegal business advantage.

Memorable filth includes Richard Nixon’s involvement with aircraft manufacturer Howard Hughes and Ronald Reagan’s link to nuclear constructor Fred Bechtel. President Nixon is also remembered for the Watergate crime, a grossly maladroit attempt to rig the electoral machine which would have made Robert Mugabe look saintly.

Most senior members of the Reagan administration – including George Shultz and Philip Habib – were former Bechtel executives and gave the firm greatly unfair advantages over rivals. At least one member of the Reagan cabinet was cited in organised crime.

George Bush Senior’s greasy personal interest in Middle East oil was (and remains) profound enough to goad him into an international war – when Iraq tried to reassert its historical right to Kuwait.

Bill Clinton has never been quite cleared of the Whitewater scam. Certain succulent sexual indulgences took him to the level of John F. Kennedy, one of the most prurient denizens of the Oval Office ever.

If pursued to the end, the crude tampering with the ballot of which his successor, George Bush Junior, was accused would have brought him into the same felonry as Mr Nixon.

Will President Bush escape the deep quagmire of corruption in which he and certain key aides are allegedly bogged? Will he clean himself of the Enron drivel?

Now Vice-President Dick Cheney faces court accusations of enriching himself through fraudulent accounting at Halliburton Corporation when he was in charge of it.

These things are true of the imperialist states in general. No recent Japanese prime minister has not been caught red-handed. In his book In God’s Name, David Yallop shows that all Italian governments are loyal envoys of the Mafiosi.

Susceptible to bribery

The activities of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, at the head of their respective governments, could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Deeper research might reveal that their predecessors and successors lived in veritable Augean stables. It might unearth radical evil in Ottawa, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm.

These facts are relevant to us because our own political leaders have the same rotten links with Big Business. The only difference is that Big Business in the Third World does not belong to it.

The transnational corporations which corrupt the Western leaders are the same ones which dominate Third World economies.

They include chemical, petroleum, drugs, banking and telecommunications transnationals. Their intrigues with the politicians in the race for tenders to buy parastatals is deeply felonious. That their political states back home front for them here is undeniable.

This is, indeed, the point. The struggle to corrupt their own leaders also stems from the knowledge that those leaders are powerfully situated to influence Third World political decisions in their favour.

“Aid” is among the carrots they dangle in front our statesmen, after they have whetted their appetites for expensive Western consumer goods, to make them incurably susceptible to bribery.

Yet, after they have thus corrupted our body politic, they send Africa’s own Gondwes, Itams and Diops to convince us that they themselves – the Western corporations and statesmen – are vestal virgins, that corruption is, indeed, inborn in the African, that we will not receive any more aid until we fight it.

Aid becomes a narcotic. The more it corrupts us, the more we clamour for it until we have mortgaged away all our life supports to secure it. Corruption is the definition of corporate capitalism. Western business practices are the self and the distributor of this, modern man’s, deep moral rot.

If the private sector stopped bribing our politicians, corruption would be annihilated overnight. But that is like saying that anopheles will one day stop injecting malaria germs in Kisii.

The horror of it is that the world’s chief corrupter – the Western corporate family and its propagandists – are the ones who preach the loudest about good governance, transparency and accountability.

Philip Ochieng, The Nation (Nairobi), July 14, 2002