Poor financial accountability and transparency are hindering Kenyan efforts to fight corruption, the outgoing World Bank country director said on Monday.
”We are all aware that Kenya’s public sector functions with limited and weak accountability,” Makhtar Diop said at a financial management forum in Nairobi.
”This creates an environment in which corruption can flourish and many public sectors are insufficiently responsive to client needs.”
His comments come barely a fortnight after Kenya’s major foreign donors set tough anti-graft conditions for the provision of new assistance and the release of previously suspended funding.
Diop specifically decried lax government procurement procedures which he said were contributing to corruption in Kenya’s ministries.
”Sound procurement practices are necessary to ensure that the governemnt gets good value for taxpayers’ money — and of course this is where much corruption happens,” he said.
A once prosperous East African nation, Kenya has experienced economic decline, a fall in living standards and a deterioration in the quality of institutions, said Carmen Lapointe-Young, a World Bank auditor.
”The waste and misuse of scarce public resources is quite common,”she said.
”The public sector requires modernising its public financial management and audit functions.”
With a per capita income of about $400, more than 50% of Kenya’s 32-million people live under a dollar a day, she said.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has come under recent stinging criticism and has been urged to rein in corruption which donors estimate may have cost Kenya up to a billion dollars since 2002, nearly a fifth of the country’s 2004-05 official government spending of about $5,5-billion.
The United States and Germany have both suspended millions of dollars in aid to Kenya and the European Union, which is the country’s largest collective donor, as well as the World Bank and Japan, have warned of consequences if inaction on graft continues. – Sapa-AFP