The Kenyan government’s frantic attempts to bury the ghost of high level corruption haunting President Mwai Kibaki’s administration suffered a major setback when exiled former anti-corruption czar, John Githongo, dropped yet another bombshell in late January, which appeared to link the president and his henchmen to a brazen bid to cream off millions of dollars through fictitious projects.
Githongo made sensational revelations of an attempt to cover up incidents of serious fraud involving multimillion-dollar tenders for the purchase of tamper-proof passport processing and police forensic laboratory equipment. He also revealed the existence of a front-company, Anglo Leasing and Finance company, which was reportedly used in the deals.
The revelations provoked angry reaction from the public, including calls for Kibaki to subject three of his ministers and Vice-President Moody Awori to justice.
“Anglo Leasing is real and not imagined. It [the fraud] is not limited to the two contracts [for passports and the forensic laboratory equipment]. It is a fraudulent series of 18 contracts amounting to over 50-billion shillings ($714-million) that remain unresolved. It implicates the vice-president and other senior members of the government,” Githongo said in a statement posted on his weblog on January 20.
The passport and laboratory equipment contracts and another to buy a naval ship from Spain were among 18 tenders Githongo and anti-graft campaigners estimate would have cost the taxpayer more than $714-million. The equipment and passport tenders were to be executed by Anglo Leasing and Finance company, which is linked to business people with connections to Kibaki and members of his Kikuyu tribe.
The fresh insights into high-level corruption are a potential disaster for the current government, which came to power pledging to root out entrenched graft in the public service.
Former minister for planning Professor Peter Anyang-Nyong’o estimated that the amount stolen by senior politicians every year was enough to finance the country’s free primary school education programme for 20 years or to provide free healthcare to the country’s 33-million people for five years.
Ironically, it is the free primary school education programme that earned Kibaki praise from the Africa Peer Review Mechanism team at this week’s African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But the committee also criticised Kibaki’s inability to rein in graft.
Kibaki’s woes worsened when a new party, the National Rainbow Coalition-Kenya (NARC-Kenya), on whose ticket he is expected to run, announced this week that it was spending $71-million for the upcoming election campaign. Kibaki (75) announced this week that he would stand for re-election.
Unlike its main rival, the Orange Democratic Movement-Kenya (ODM-Kenya), which has explained the source of the $28-million it has budgeted for its election campaign, NARC-Kenya did not disclose the source of its funding. The lack of transparency in its source funding led to speculation that its money could be part of the loot stolen from government coffers over the past four years. ODM-Kenya is on record saying that it receives financial support from the Democratic Party in the United States and the Labour Party in Britain.
The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), which is headed by Kibaki’s friend Justice Aaron Ringera, recently dismissed a taped conversation in which former finance minister David Mwiraria allegedly attempted to convince Githongo to stay clear of investigations into the suspect deals. In the taped conversation, Mwiraria is heard urging Githongo to abandon the investigation because “it had the potential to bring down Kibaki’s government”.
About the KACC boss, Githongo said: “I am not persuaded that Justice Ringera did not deliberately conceal or erase the recordings of my statement to him, in view of the fact that he told me to my face … that those responsible for Anglo Leasing would never be prosecuted before the 2007 General Election, if ever.”
The government allegedly made a down payment for passport equipment, the cost of which had been inflated from $11,5-million to $37-million after Kibaki came to power in 2002.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Martha Karua, announced last week that the alleged chief architects of fraud in the government would be neither investigated nor prosecuted. Two of Kibaki’s allies named in the fraud, Education Minister George Saitoti and Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi, have resumed their posts after they were cleared of the allegations by the KACC last December.
Ringera stunned the country when he said that the taped conversations Githongo had with Kibaki’s cabinet ministers were “frivolous” and legally inadmissible because the exiled former permanent secretary “was not an investigator”.