Serious shortcomings in ethics act, says watchdog

Kenya's public officer ethics act, aimed at stemming corruption by forcing public officials to declare their wealth, has "serious shortcomings" that threaten its effectiveness, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said on Thursday.

A major weakness in the act was that it required each of the eight commissions gathering the information from Kenya's officials to keep the declarations confidential, thereby preventing any public scrutiny, the organisation said at a press conference in Nairobi.

By requiring all public officials and government employees, from ministers to messengers, to make declarations in a "one-size-fits-all remedy", the act had also created "a monumental administrative task". The most recent survey from the ministry of planning had found that in 2002, no less than 659,000 people were employed in the public sector in Kenya.

Furthermore, the act did not provide for essential monitoring procedures. Neither did it deal with assets that were held outside of Kenya nor those belonging to children of public officials over the age of 18, leaving itself wide open to abuses, TI said.

But Kenya's assistant justice minister, Robinson Githae, defended the act saying it provided "adequate mechanisms" for fighting corruption and was a compromise between two opposing views - that of the government which was keen to see public declarations of wealth, and that of the former ruling party, Kanu, which was keen to keep the information secret.

He added that the declarations were "confidential not secret", and that any person who could show a particular interest in obtaining information about an individual, could petition the High Court for permission to do so.

TI has recommended that prominent Kenyan officials and MPs step forward to make voluntary public disclosures as a means of sending a "powerful message to the public" and putting pressure on others to do likewise.

In the long term, further legislation should be introduced to strengthen the declaration scheme, and the number of people obliged to file declarations should be reduced to a manageable level, it said.

The public officer ethics act took effect on 2 May 2003 and requires all public officers to file initial declarations by 29 September, and annually after that. Those who fail to make declarations or give false information can be fined up to one million Kenya shillings or face a month's imprisonment.