Bishops call for action on governance, corruption

The Catholic bishops of Kenya this week urged President Daniel arap Moi to intensify the fight against corruption within his government in order to allow it better address poverty alleviation and the provision of basic services for ordinary citizens.

The bishops, who have just ended their bi-annual Plenary Conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, stated that corruption and bribery were the main factors depriving Kenyans of much- needed public services such as education, health, road maintenance and public administration.

"It is the poor and the powerless who suffer all the time," they added.

"Whilst we religious leaders are aware of the depressed world economic situation and the adverse climatic conditions, we cannot - [along] with many serious economists - admit that the government cannot curb the scandalous corruption which is found at so many levels, even at the upper levels," they said in a statement made available to IRIN.

The bishops also expressed concern about the rising cost of living in Kenya, which, they said, placed most basic social services out of reach of majority of the population of 28 million, according to the statement, signed by Rt-Rev John Njue of the Kenya Episcopal Conference.

The meeting, which ended on Tuesday, addressed a broad range of issues concerning Kenyans' standard of living, with particular focus on areas of concern to the church, such as abortion and HIV/AIDS.

The bishops put many of the growing social ills of the country - from crime and drug abuse to violence and poverty - down to "bad governance".

"We cannot, as shepherds, but lament that our politicians seem to be exclusively concerned with staying in power, growing rich and grabbing land and businesses from the wananchi (citizens). No wonder our youth have lost hope and do not trust their elders," they said.

The episcopal conference urged the Kenyan government to launch fresh investigations into the killing last year of Fr John Anthony Kaiser, the Mill Hill missionary priest who was found dead, with a gunshot wound to his head, at Morendat, on the Naivasha-Nairobi road, in what church and human rights groups believe to have been a murder incident.

The Catholic church has rejected analysis from the American Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Kenya's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) which stated that Fr Kaiser, a committed human rights activist, had committed suicide.

Kenyan human rights groups in August called upon the government to release the Akiwumi Commission report, which investigated the country’s land clashes of 1992-97. Fr Kaiser had presented his views to this Commission, implicating government officials in the clashes, in the year before he died, they stated.

"We have asked the Attorney-General to allow an inquest but we have not received a formal reply," the bishops stated after this week's Nairobi conference.

"Since our request seems to have fallen on deaf ears for questionable reasons, we are considering other possibilities. We are not giving up," they added.