A cabal of key ministers, top civil servants and businessmen plotted to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kenyan exchequer, according to a confidential dossier compiled by the country’s exiled former anti-corruption tsar.
In the 36-page dossier seen by The Guardian, John Githongo accuses Kenya’s vice-president and three ministers of complicity in suspect military and security contracts worth $700-million. He alleges that two ministers finally admitted that the money was for party political campaigning.
The dossier does not directly implicate President Mwai Kibaki but, according to Githongo, one of the ministers ”both implicitly and explicitly indicated that … the president knew about all these shenanigans”. In an interview with Associated Press on Sunday Githongo asserted that President Kibaki ”knew about it all along”.
The report was sent to the president in November, with an accompanying letter in which Githongo, who quit his post as permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics last year, said he had ”evidence of culpability on the part of the senior-most officials of our administration”.
”I am in a position to conclusively substantiate the claims made in the attached report by means of incontrovertible material evidence,” he told Kibaki.
Diplomats say his claims, if true, could topple the three-year-old government.
Explaining his reasons for going public, Githongo, now at St Antony’s College, Oxford, told The Guardian on Sunday night: ”I have a personal problem of conscience. The knowledge that the stealing is still going on, while I sit quietly doing nothing, has been burning me up. I want to get this monkey off my back.”
In the dossier Githongo gives details of 17 procurement contracts that raised his suspicions. The government signed multimillion-dollar contracts with companies for police equipment, naval vessels and security software. But investigations showed that the companies never existed or delivered only token services at hugely inflated prices. He managed to ensure that some contracts were cancelled and funds returned, but believes millions of dollars may have gone missing.
He singles out the former internal security minister, Chris Murungaru, as a key figure. Murungaru was dropped from the government after Britain and the US last year denied him permission to enter. But Githongo also accuses the finance minister, David Mwiraria, the former justice minister (now Energy Minister) Kiraitu Murungi and Moody Awori, the Vice-President.
All four have said they have nothing to hide and are ready to appear before the KACC. Paul Muite, lawyer for Murungaru, said that the British government was behind the latest allegations against his client. ”They said the visa was withdrawn because Dr Murungaru has been linked with corrupt practices. We asked them for evidence. What they filed in the high court of justice in England were photocopies of [Kenyan newspapers] the Nation and the Standard. Nothing concrete.” Muite said the former minister was not a wealthy man.
Githongo, who was known for keeping detailed records of all meetings, chronicles a series of admissions by ministers, as well as growing pressure from colleagues to abandon his inquiries, death threats and a ministerial attempt to blackmail him into silence. He says he began having doubts about the feasibility of his post after the Anglo Leasing scandal, involving contracts worth £50-million for a passport computer system and forensic laboratory, surfaced in parliament in early 2004. It emerged that the companies that won the contracts were bogus.
He recounts conversations with Mwiraria and Murungi in June 2004 in which the former acknowleged that: ”Anglo Leasing was in effect ‘us’ — our people.” Later that month, he adds: ”Both ministers pushed me hard to back off or the government would be undone by the fight against corruption since now it was clear, as we noted, ‘that many of our people were involved’.”
”The list of suspect contracts by fictitious companies grew by the day although the cast of characters was the same. In my estimation we were sitting on roughly $700m worth of contracts, some of them highly dubious.” – Guardian Unlimited Â