Government defeated on anti-corruption measures

The Kenyan government on Tuesday suffered an embarrassing setback when MPs refused to deliver the 65 percent majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment act, which it needed before introducing its contentious Kenya Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Bill and re-establishing the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACA).

President Daniel arap Moi had issued a public statement on Monday, warning that if parliament failed to pass the bill, the country would be denied at least 25 billion Kenya Shillings (some US $317 million) in external funding and vast amounts of private sector investment.

Moi also put his political prestige on the line by taking the unprecedented step of personally going to parliament to vote and to lobby for support on Tuesday, but the bill still fell 15 votes short of the 145 needed to pass the constitutional amendment.

The original KACA was ruled unconstitutional by the Kenyan High Court in January, on the basis that it undermined the powers of the attorney general and the police commissioner. If passed, Tuesday’s bill would have allowed the government present its Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Bill - providing for the re-establishment of KACA - and another on a public service code of conduct and ethics.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) discontinued aid to Kenya last year because of its failure to fulfil promises on tackling corruption and privatising the economy.

Lending to Kenya was not suspended or precluded, Samuel Itam, the IMF’s senior resident representative in Nairobi, told IRIN last month.

Disbursements that would have been expected in support of Kenya’s economic reform programme were not made because the government had not delivered on a number of key issues, he said. Once these issues were addressed, the funds could be released, he added.

“We believe the reform process is important for Kenya, and a fundamental pillar of that is governance,” Itam said. The main issues involved, he said, were: the need for a constitutional amendment to re-establish the KACA within a legal framework; the need for legislation dealing with corruption and economic crimes; and the need for a code of conduct for all three branches of government - the executive, legislature and judiciary.

The BBC on Wednesday reported that the IMF was withholding an estimated US $20 million in aid as a result of these key conditionalities not being met.

This year’s budget has allowed for an assumed inflow of US $300 million in foreign aid into an economy dependent on donor funding, and plagued by dwindling private investment and increasing capital flight. The economy is already experiencing its worst recession since independence (in 1963) and last year actually shrank by 0.3 percent. Analysts now expect it to go deeper into recession.

“I expect interest rates to go up, I expect retrenchments to increase, I expect confidence from investors to fall,” Wilfred Kiboro of the Federation of Kenya Employers told the BBC after Tuesday’s parliamentary defeat for the government.

Kenyan Minister for Trade and Industry Nicholas Biwott, an influential figure in the government of President Moi, last month criticised the aid conditions imposed on Kenya as impractical, and suggested they smacked of double standards. Biwott cited “good governance” as an impractical conditionality, which lacked a uniform definition.

“Kenya would like to be assisted without being given conditionalities by the donors but, since we happen to be poor, we are sometimes unable to argue,” he added.

But Kenya is regularly ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world, and the IMF’s suspension of lending late last year signalled a feeling that the government was backtracking on efforts to fight official corruption, the BBC reported on Wednesday.

The resignation in March of the conservationist, Richard Leakey, who was appointed head of the notoriously corrupt Kenyan civil service in 1999 with a brief to crack down on corruption, had also given rise to speculation that he was carrying out his brief too diligently and had offended some senior people, it added.

It cited a recent parliamentary report by the Public Accounts Committee which revealed that US $10 billion of public funds went missing between 1994 and 1995, including funds from the Central Bank, the state-run posts and telecommunications corporation, and Kenya Railways.

Opposition parties explained on Tuesday that they had rejected the constitutional amendment because any anti-corruption authority resulting from the legislation based on the bill in its present form would have been too weak to make any difference.

Democratic Party (DP) leader Mwai Kibaki described it as “a gimmick by the corrupt elements in the present government”.

“What we don’t want is a lame-duck Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority, a KACA that will be shrouded in constitutional and legal problems,” said the DP shadow attorney general, Kiraitu Murungi.

“We need IMF money, the government knows this and should prepare proper bills,” the BBC quoted Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, head of the political bureau at the opposition Social Democratic Party of Kenya, as saying.

Church groups, opposition MPs and professionals have dismissed the suggestion that Tuesday’s bill was a step in the right direction, saying that a bill giving the reconstituted KACA “full autonomy” was needed. A coalition of groups intended to be represented on the revitalised authority said that, while it understood the urgent need to tackle corruption and unlock international aid, the bill was defective and had to be rejected.

The group cited six “major anomalies” in the Constitutional Amendment Bill and called it unworkable. The organisations also strongly opposed the provision in the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Bill to allow an amnesty for crimes committed before December 1997, and said both bills had the potential for conflict between the Attorney-General and KACA in the execution of their duties.