The Bribe Has Spoken

The most popular song in Kenya last year was Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo (Country of Bribes), a sing-along tune about the ubiquity of corruption in everyday life. If you’re trying to succeed in school, if you’re sick in the hospital or if you lose your identity card, goes the lyric, to get anything done in Kenya you have to pay a bribe. Kenyans have adopted the song as an anti-officialdom anthem, and they flock to appearances by its 28-year-old writer and singer, Eric Wainaina. “We like it because it’s the truth,” says Judy Elahuya, a housekeeper. “For everything you must bribe. That really makes you angry.” It’s a culture “that disempowers people and makes us pay for things that are our right,” says Wainaina, who is studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston. “It’s bleeding our country poor.”

Kenya ranks near the bottom of Berlin-based Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, beaten only by such “show-me-the-money” countries as Nigeria and Indonesia. High-level corruption continues unabated, as evidenced by the 1990s Goldenberg scandal — named for a company that allegedly exported nonexistent gold and then claimed export credits from the Central Bank. The financial scam cost Kenya at least $400 million and allegedly involved top officials and senior politicians close to President Daniel arap Moi. International donors have frozen funds earmarked for Kenya in large part because of the country’s failure to set up an independent anticorruption body.

President Moi recently announced the latest in a string of attempts to convince donors that he is serious about cracking down on graft — the appointment of a team of corruption busters from Risk Advisory Group, a London firm that describes itself as an “independent investigations and intelligence consultancy.” The team will make recommendations on how best to fight corruption. Many Kenyans are skeptical. “Stamping out corruption in this country is not really a matter of experts, it is about political leadership,” says opposition M.P. Anyang Nyong’o.

The consultants will have plenty to look into. Investors routinely factor in funds to cover the bribes they know they will be forced to pay; schools help students cheat in national exams; well-connected officials are granted public land. Last year, Nairobi City Council officials conducting a headcount of employees turned up hundreds of “ghost” workers who collected paychecks but were not officially employed. Even as City Hall called the investigation a success it was revealed that headcount forms had been fraudulently sold to unofficial workers hoping to escape detection. “The results are there for everybody to see,” says Gachukia Nyaga, an analyst with the Institute of Economic Affairs in Nairobi. “Corruption has gone so deep it has affected the fundamentals of our economy, growth, investment.”

A report released in January by the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International suggests that small, everyday bribes are just as costly as big-time fraud. Researchers asked more than 1,000 Kenyans how often they were hit up for bribes, how much they paid and whether things were getting worse. Respondents to the Kenyan Urban Bribery Index, as the survey is called, paid around 16 bribes a month, an average of $100 or one-third of respondents’ mean monthly income. Most respondents said things were getting worse. The biggest bribe takers, according to the findings, are law-enforcement institutions like the police and the judiciary. The immigration department and local councils are also high on the list. “It’s public officials with power over ordinary people who are imposing the highest corruption burden on society,” says David Ndii, the Index’s researcher.

The report provides some pointers on how to curb corruption. The least corrupt institutions tend to be those that have been deregulated. The Central Bank of Kenya was notorious for bribery in the days of foreign-exchange controls, for instance, but with the exchange market liberalized, the bank ranks as the least bribable institution in the country. Says Ndii: “Liberalizing the market can really work.” Unfortunately, it is a slow process in Kenya, in part because liberalization upsets so many vested interests. Real change will require more than a visiting vice squad. It will need a “complete cleanup, legally, morally, everything,” says musician Wainaina. That would be something to sing about.