Chapter 6 - National Betrayal: Bureaucratic Corruption and Rent-Seeking

Summary

Introduction

In 2020, three presidential families in Kenya—the Kenyattas, Mois, and Kibakis—ranked among the richest 20 families in the country. This reality, according to Alexia Rij (2021), is a product of the country's entrenched neo-patrimonial regime that dates back to colonialism. The characteristic feature of this type of regime is the conflict of public and private interests, with the latter taking precedence over the former, resulting in the elite accumulating wealth through various corrupt practices: “Although the features and forms of corruption have changed over time, the underlying logic persists while becoming more complex” (Rij 2021: 9). In an inadvertent acknowledgment of the entrenched nature of corruption in Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted, in January 2021, that KES 2 billion is stolen daily from national coffers (Muriuki 2021). The fact that corruption in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions is beyond question. In the 1960s and 1970s, bureaucratic corruption manifested itself in bureaucrats’ demands for kickbacks valued at around 10 percent of the total cost of a public tender, development project, or whatever goods or services were under procurement. By the 1980s and 1990s, the rates had escalated to around 40 percent. Under the Uhuru–Ruto dispensation in Kenya (2013–22), the rates maxed out to 100 percent! (Nasong’o 2020). This is the situation where, for instance, a development project is conjured up, it is costed, awarded, and paid for, but nothing is done. The exemplification of this is the Kimwarer and Arror dams project scandal in which billions were paid out for nothing (Some 2019; Standard Digital Team 2019). Alternatively, public funds are simply withdrawn from bank accounts and directly pocketed by public officers, a most brazen form of corruption that was amplified by the investigative report in 2020 on the financial shenanigans at Maasai Mara University (Muia 2020). In view of the epidemic levels corruption had reached in Kenya, a national conference on corruption was convened in January 2019 at the Bomas of Kenya. At the conference, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted that the government would relentlessly pursue high-profile cases already in the courts and launch a crackdown to ensure all corrupt persons are held accountable.