Seek help on cross-border crime, graft

Our security and investigative agencies are increasingly collaborating with their foreign counterparts. From graft in public offices to an alleged assassination plot, we heard from the agencies that they were or had reached out to America’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) for assistance.

BREAKTHROUGH

Pessimists are already saying we can do away with our own Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and simply, and officially, contract on a full-time basis the services of the FBI. For, it is argued, there was no point keeping thousands of local investigators who could not establish the authenticity or source of a one-page letter on a permanent and pensionable payroll!

The argument goes further that our top detectives and prosecutors spend so much time and resources sourcing for external help and avoiding doing actual investigations that it was becoming increasingly hard to understand what time they ever worked.

The situation has been getting compounded by that, for most of the time the head of DCI, George Kinoti, and Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji are in the country, they are holding press conferences saying how they have been around the world soliciting for help and getting assurances they would get it.

The general frustration with the two top law enforcers has been growing; there seems to be no breakthrough in the said investigations.

However, this blanket distaste for efforts to seek and acquire foreign help in the fight against crime in general and corruption in particular is mainly caused by lack of understanding on how investigations, and criminals, work, as well as ineffective communication from the concerned departments.

A meeting between senior officials of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the US ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter last Friday could help shed light on just why international collaboration in investigation and crime busting is important, nay, unavoidable.

AGREEMENTS

And it is not just because of Kenya’s technical and human intelligence inferiority. After the meeting, the diplomat announced that he and the EACC’s chairman and chief executive officer, Eliud Wabukhala and Twalib Mbarak, respectively, had agreed that the FBI would henceforth work with the local anti-graft agency to investigate and bring to book “high-profile” corruption architects.

The envoy gave a number of plausible reasons for this collaboration – including Kenya’s obvious lack of adequate resources; the fact that most thieves hide their loot abroad, sometimes in America; and the obvious international connivance of cartels in the corruption industry, hence the need to share intelligence.

The meeting, we were told, dwelt on strengthening the relationship between Kenya’s anti-corruption body and the US sleuth agency in collaboration, cooperation and coordination in the fight against fraud locally.

And it is not only the US that Kenya’s law enforcers have engaged or keep engaging, although the cooperation with the FBI is quite conspicuous.

It might be a public communication shortfall but the country seems to be doing the right thing in cross-border crime purge. During the meeting, it was revealed that Kenya had signed agreements with the United Kingdom and Switzerland with the ultimate aim of having a structured way of recovering ill-acquired wealth hidden in those territories.

GLOBE-TROTTING

Of course, the country remembers the case of a former Finance minister and an electricity generating agency executive who have avoided justice for over a decade by fighting extradition in the courts!

We are also reminded that, last year, the government wrote to another seven countries seeking details of some billions of shillings hidden there by our thieving lords in an effort meant to get the money back and have the culprits answer for their wayward behaviour!

It is now obvious that collaboration with foreign agencies and governments actually pays. Though the jury is still out on the latest bust of a corruption syndicate, the fact that such senior government officials as Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich and his Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge, among others, have been arraigned over graft gives hope that there’s the will and ability to fight corruption.

That this came about after many trips by Messrs Kinoti and Haji to Dubai, South Africa and Italy is an indication that the globe-trotting isn’t a junket. We couldn’t do this without assistance from detectives from other countries.

Mr Mugwang’a, a communications consultant, is a former crime and security reporter. [email protected].