Unless we beat corruption, Kenya will not attract investors

Mombasa residents queue to register to get passports at the headquarters of immigration services in the coastal region on June 9, 2014. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • One of the ways we can get rid of corruption in government departments is by having have performance contracts based on the ability of Cabinet Secretaries, Permanent Secretaries and heads of departments to curb corruption in their ministries.
  • If they fail, they should be shown the door.

An elderly German man who has retired in Kenya told me that he and his wife are considering going back to Germany because they are fed up of paying bribes every time they want to renew their residency permit.

He said that when he first moved to Kenya more than a decade ago, it was pretty straightforward to renew his residency permit as long as he provided the relevant documents.

But in recent years, he has had to go through a so-called agent, a person who collects and distributes bribes on behalf of his superiors and colleagues and who also acts as the “representative” of the person seeking government services.

He says that it is not just the Immigration Department that is extracting these bribes from him but virtually every government department that he has had to deal with. And in all cases, he has had to deal with an agent.

He added that many of his friends are also considering leaving Kenya for good because the constant bribe-giving is not just leaving a bad taste in their mouths, it is costing them a fortune.

Now this particular German couple spends an average of 3,000 euros or roughly Sh340,000 of their German pension in Kenya every month, or 36,000 euros (Sh4 million) every year. Let us say 100 of their friends also decide to leave the country. Kenya will lose at least 3.6 million euros or Sh400 million every year just because bribes have made their life so unbearable that they would rather leave the country than continue dishing them out.

Therefore, the government will have lost an important source of foreign currency it desperately needs.

Corruption not only impacts those forced to give bribes, it also has a ripple effect on the rest of the economy and affects ordinary wananchi at multiple levels.

The money this German couple will not spend in Kenya will impact the employment prospects of the cashier who serves them at their local supermarket. The amount of VAT the supermarket owner submits to the government will also decline.

UNATRACCTIVE DESTINATION

If official corruption is endemic, as it is in Kenya, it raises the cost of doing business, thus making the country an unattractive destination for foreign and local investors.

I will give you another example. A young Kenyan who lived in the United States decided to come back home because he felt he needed to give back to his country. He had a plan to instal solar panels in Kenya as part of a non-profit organisation.

When the panels arrived at the port of Mombasa, he was handed a customs duty bill of Sh3 million even though they were supposed to be duty-free.

He could not afford this money or the bribe, and so the panels are probably still lying at the port or have been vandalised or sold by customs officials. This young man is now considering whether he should go back to the United States and contribute to the American economy.

Yet another case. Someone I know recently tried to apply for a Kenyan passport online. Instead of reducing the opportunities for corruption, the new digitised system seems to have created new opportunities for giving and receiving bribes.

In her case, she could not answer all the questions on the online form because some of them did not apply to her. For example, she could not provide her father’s ID number because, like many Kenyans who are over the age of 50, her father died before IDs were made mandatory in the country. Someone then recommended that she look for “an agent” or someone with influence who could assist with her application.

One of the ways we can get rid of corruption in government departments is by having performance contracts based on the ability of Cabinet Secretaries, Permanent Secretaries and heads of departments to curb corruption in their ministries. If they fail, they should be shown the door.

The government says that the Huduma Centres that it has established are virtually corruption-free. If indeed this is true, then there should be Huduma Centres all across the country.

To improve the services provided, there must also be help desks where people can register their complaints and fill out forms manually if the digitised systems fail them.