Issue # 3 (February 11)

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News and views from Transparency International - Kenya

DEFINING CORRUPTION IN THE AFRICAN CONTEXT

KENYA LIKE MANY other African countries that adopted political pluralism and economic liberalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, is into the third stage of its ‘transition’ from colonial state to a modern democracy where power is accountable.

The first stage of the transition took place in years preceding and immediately following independence where indigenous Africans assumed control of the vital governance institutions in their countries- parliament, the executive, judiciary and civil service. The elites used their newfound political power – that also found bureaucratic and military expression – to accumulate wealth in a variety of ways – many of which would today be described as ‘corruption’ but in the 1960s were seen as correcting some of the historic wrongs of colonialism and were tolerated internationally in the context of the Cold War. (Corruption, simply defined is the ‘misuse of public power for private gain’).

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 coincided with a time when economic growth had declined dramatically in most African countries and population growth and urbanization had increased. Centralized often economically inefficient regimes led by leaders disinclined to political pluralism were no longer able to satisfy the economic and political demands of a young population raised on expectations fuelled by the global mass media.

The second major phase of the African transition took place in the early 90s. Leaders in many African countries, heading nearly bankrupt nations with dominant state sectors increasingly unable to provide even the most basic services to citizens, found themselves forced to give in to donor demands for political and economic liberalization. Economically weak states were forced to adopt economic policy prescriptions whose political implications were to undermine the very foundations of the predominantly patronage-based systems of governance that had come to dominate most Sub-Saharan African countries since independence.

Some countries did not survive the broad swathe of the new ‘wind of change’ that exacerbated internal contradictions playing themselves out, sometimes violently. Notable were Somalia (state collapse in 1991) and Sierra Leone (President Jospeh Siadu Momoh deposed in 1992, war soon followed). In other countries, liberalisation’s generalized study attrition undermined the political and economic foundations of the state and ruling elites to the point where some previously entrenched leaders lost democratic elections - Zambia (President Kenneth Kaunda lost to Paul Chiluba in 1991), Malawi (President Kamuzu Banda lost to Bakili Muluzi in 1994) and Benin (President Mathieu Kerekou lost to Nicephore Soglo in 1991).

The 1990s also saw leaders in other African countries lose control over significant sections of their countries to rebel groups, some of which eventually assumed control of what remained of national government. This included Congo Brazzaville (August 1992 Pascal Lissouba won democratic elections, was overthrown by Denis Saasou Nguesso in 1997) and Rwanda (President Juvenal Habyarimanna assassinated in 1994, civil war and genocide followed, Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) took over and continues to battle Hutu rebel movements).

Other African countries further entrenched their systems of patronage while maintaining the outside appearance of genuine fundamental reform. There are those who would argue that Zimbabwe, Kenya, Togo and Cameroon fall in this category.

Across Africa, some net effects of the economic and political liberalization are a dramatic growth in the size of political space available to non-state actors including civil society, multi-party legislatures and media. However, in countries where small ruling cliques, used to wielding power, have clung on to it, there is major denigration of the rule of law, the informalisation of politics, an increase in political violence and attendant impunity in its regard. But most importantly, from where Transparency International-Kenya stands, has been the dramatic increase in corruption types that have serious macro-economic consequences and which have led to rapid criminalisation of the economy.

In countries where governance is dominated not by formal institutions but by informal patronage systems, corruption is the fuel that sustains politics. Therefore in such societies it is both systemic and perverse: senior public officials who retire from civil service without accumulating substantial wealth, for example, are often derided as ‘fools’ in their home villages across Africa. Indeed, in Kenya it is common for individuals publicly mentioned as having been involved in questionable activities involving public resources to be elected to parliament.

This is very much the moral/political/social context vis-à-vis corruption in countries like Kenya. It demands a concerted, creative and highly relevant strategy for dealing with it. A strategy that acknowledges the fact that for many ruling elites across the continent- to seriously fight corruption is to commit political suicide because it is the resources availed by kickbacks, gifts, allocations of public land, public supply and construction contracts, interest free loans from state banks and money laundering that verge on the criminal at worst and economic delinquency at the very least an the part of leaders, that pay for politics in Africa.