Odious Debts Online
August 18, 2006

A new report by Kenya’s National Anti-Corruption Campaign Steering Committee claims that Kenyans rate corruption as the country’s Number One issue and want President Kibaki to lead the way in the fight against graft – an issue citizens consider even more grave than poverty, unemployment and famine.
Ninety-six percent of those surveyed for the report entitled, “The State of Corruption in Kenya – Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices and Behaviour,” ranked corruption as Kenya’s most pressing issue, although 63 percent of those interviewed felt the government was not committed enough to curbing the problem (Capital FM).

“Citizens are feeling that Parliament and cabinet ministers are not the right people to fight corruption, they mention the judiciary and police who they think handle the issue confidentially,” said the report committee’s director, Polycarp Ochillo.

According to Nairobi’s East African Standard, Kenyans responding to the survey said prosecuting corruption suspects was “the surest way for the government to demonstrate its commitment” to the public and that although Kenyans believe reporting corruption
would be an effective way to curb vice, they themselves have opted to keep quiet.

About 59.8 percent said they had witnessed corruption but had not been willing to report it because they feared for their lives and believed the suspects would not be prosecuted.

Of those interviewed, 27.2 percent said they would prefer reporting corruption to the country’s Criminal Investigation Department rather than the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission’s (KACC) Integrity Centre.

The report found that police bribery rated as the most common form of graft, followed by land grabbing and favouritism within the police department. Kenyans estimated the average cost of bribes was between Sh100 and Sh1,000 (between US$1 and US$14), while the cost of buying jobs was in excess of Sh50,000 (more than US$690).

According to the African Standard, the report committee said the government’s fight against graft had been ‘operating in a vacuum without leadership and political will.’

“This is not surprising,” editorialised the Standard, adding that “the only time the government and its anti-corruption agencies have appeared to be enraged by this [graft] monster has been at workshops where they pontificate on good leadership.

“There is nothing wrong with seminars to strategise on executing government policy but there is everything wrong when individuals and institutions appointed to mainstream policy only excel at roundtable talks.”

The national anti-corruption report follows on the heels of another report released weeks earlier by the KACC, which had cited the Office of the President as the country’s most corrupt institution.