E-Clips:- Business Pictorial - "No Sacred Cows" In Kenyan Graft Fight

iol.co.za (South Africa)

Nairobi - Kenya has, for as long as anyone can remember, ranked high on lists over the most corrupt countries in the world.

No more, says the Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, who is stepping up his fight against graft saying there will be "no sacred cows" in the fight his government is waging against corruption.

"Kibaki has staked his political credibility on the anti-corruption war," says Gladwell Otieno, who heads the Kenya chapter of the anti-graft organisation Transparency International (TI).

"If nothing comes out of it, there is a serious loss of credibility for the government. Then they may as well hang their boots up," she adds.

Otieno told Deutsche Presse Agentur she believed a battle was being fought at the highest levels of government in Kenya.

"There is obviously a hard fight going on between those who are interested in reform - probably a minority - and those who go into politics to amass wealth," she said.

During the 24-year-long regime of Daniel arap Moi, which ended in 2002, large-scale state corruption among senior politicians was routine and many of them ended up sitting on vast fortunes, while the majority of Kenyans lived below the poverty line.

Mwai Kibaki swept to power on an anti-corruption platform. To show he meant business, he appointed the former head of Transparency International Kenya, John Githongo, Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics.

"There seems to be a level of commitment (to the fight against corruption) at the very top," commented Gladwell Otieno.

However, in spite of the professed dedication to the anti-graft war at the top, the Kibaki government was recently hit by a major corruption scandal.

A project worth 800 million Shillings (R70-million) for purchasing passport-issuing equipment was expanded into costing 2.7 billion Shillings and the tender was awarded to a French firm without competitive bidding.

The government stopped the project, but the scandal set off alarm bells, and Kenyan media have since been focusing on what is seen as a re-emergence of state corruption.

On Friday, the government announced it had suspended four senior officials in the government. One was reported to be the Permanent Secretary in the Finance Ministry.

"The corrupt networks that held the State hostage under the former regime have started attempting to regroup," John Githongo was quoted as saying this week.

Earlier, anti-graft czar Githongo said the government was "willing to pay the political price of fighting corruption in its own ranks, no matter how high that corruption reaches."

Government ministers have indicated more heads would roll.

A backlash in the government anti-graft campaign came last week, when Kenya was denied the right to apply for funds from the American Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) as the US said Kenya had not done enough to control official corruption.

"With the election of the Narc government a year ago, many Kenyans had hoped that the pariah status the country had gained over graft and rights abuses would soon end. But this does not seem to be the case," the Sunday nation newspaper commented in an editorial.

Earlier this week, Kenyan Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi said members of a steering committee which will oversee a five-year national Campaign Against Corruption would be appointed soon.

Whether the campaign will manage to eradicate the graft which has infiltrated every level of society in Kenya during the last decades remains to be seen.

But Kenya seems to have managed to get their message across to some donors. The government was this week promised money from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and Germany to help in their fight against corruption.