Young and loaded: Desire for rich life drives youth to crime

As the public sector reels from mega-scandals, private companies are wrestling with their own devil — fraud.

Experts conservatively estimate Kenya’s banks are losing Sh1 billion a year to a new breed of employees who are hungry for flashy lifestyles, but are in too much of a hurry to save up for them.

That generation is itching to drive that souped-up Subaru today, not tomorrow and no morality or loyalty is going to stand in their way.

They want to live in that trendy apartment in a prosperous address of the city and they can’t see why it cannot be done without breaking a sweat. Hard work, or robbing banks physically, they will tell you, are so yesterday.

They imagine themselves clad from head to toe in Gucci and flying out for holidays with the girls. Or driving around the city in convertibles, the wind in their hair, dark glasses insulating them from envious eye contact with a mass of people they regard as clueless.

This is the generation that fleeces Kenyan banks and other businesses of about a billion shillings annually to finance a lifestyle that has been thrust on them by peer pressure, if not unbridled ambition.

Most of them work in banks or the financial departments of big businesses where their information technology skills are indispensable.

They transfer billions of funds to offshore accounts for customers and run complex inter-bank settlements and forex transactions.

DUMMY COMPANIES

Ordinarily, such skills should advance the ease of transactions and the security of bank accounts, but they are now being used to skim hundreds of millions of shillings from fat accounts.

The more careful ones will even register dummy companies of their own from whose accounts the loot is swiftly withdrawn to buy that Subaru or Audi, or moved around the world in zero time at the click on an icon.

Kenya Commercial Bank CEO Joshua Oigara agrees fraud is fed by the desire for higher lifestyle and peer pressure commonly associated with young people who are the majority of bank employees today.

“Fraud is certainly not a new thing and the statistics you see only show that corporates are now much more willing to talk about them,” says Mr Oigara.

But in spite of vigorous background checks and training on ethics and fraud prevention, young employees are frowning on traditional career virtues that encouraged gradual growth, he said

It is a serious case of the park keeper shooting the rhinos. According to Mr Oigara, “Close to 40 per cent of fraud cases in our bank were directly perpetrated by employees, while another substantial portion involved collusion with external players”.

He told the Nation that the bank last year experienced fraud cases involving Sh300 million. Slightly over half of these were successful while the rest were prevented.

And, according to Mr Muniu Thoithi, an advisory partner and forensics leader for East Africa with PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global survey by the firm is “very telling”.

From that survey, he said, 66 out of 124 responding organisations reported having suffered economic crime of one nature or the other.

Out of the ones that reported having suffered, 70 per cent indicated the impact was in the region of about $100,000 (about Sh9 million) or less. Twenty-five per cent of those indicated the impact was in the region of $100,000 to $5million (Sh9m-Sh450m).

Only a small percentage, about three per cent, indicated having suffered an impact in excess of $5 million (Sh450m).