B (7:46)
Thank you very, thank you very much. Prof. I would like to start by thanking the London School of Economics for making it possible for me to be here today, to Kate Maga for really facilitating this visit and Professor Tandika, really for the work that you've done, that you're famous for in terms of the African Academy, for facilitating this lecture series, Asante Sana, for bringing some of us out here to be able to say a few things. I was a bit intimidated when I heard that my two colleagues had dropped out and I was politely told that I had to extend my presentation by 20 minutes. So I shall, I shall try and write to the occasion. I think I know both the two previous two other gentlemen who I was to speak with, Mr. Nuhur Ibadu, who is now standing for president of Nigeria, and my colleague from Senegal as well, where there appears to have been some incompetence on the part of the police force on that side, Partly because I am not used to speaking for so long. I'm going to give, I won't call it a lecture because I'm not a lecturer. I'll give a story that has 11 points that I would like to make. First of all, it's just to talk a little bit about my own personal experience in the fight against corruption. Secondly, I would like to say a bit about what the fight against corruption looks like when you're winning in Africa, because it's possible to win and those moments have been there. And then I'd also like to talk about the unspoken pact of patronage that often lay waste to even the very best of anti corruption plans that may be had. Then I'll answer this question that is asked about the goat by some people who say, is this the African way? You hear it especially from business so called experts, analysts with some of the consultancy firms and the like say this is African way, You know, corruption, a bit of corruption, a bit of bribery here, kickback here and there. This is the, this is, this is how it is in Africa. So I'll ask about that. Then I'll talk a bit about Kenya, about the current overarching realities in Kenya that are going to define basically Kenya's next five years, regardless of whatever Happens then. Sixth, talk about the inequalities that are part of that. Seven, I'll touch a bit perhaps on what I call the international delusions about Kenya, then on the politics of identity and economic growth and how they're intertwined in a country like Kenya and in many African countries. The ninth, I'll give you anti corruption Kenya 101, I called it, which is essentially the program that the Kenya government set about implementing divide corruption beginning early 2002, but had started slightly earlier than that and which is still, still theoretically in play now. Then finally I'll talk about the Kenyan constitution and some of the scenarios that are being considered in terms of how that will play out and how it features in the fight against corruption. I was appointed to government in December 2002 as a permanent Secretary in charge of governance and ethics in the Office of the President. Within a couple of months, a couple of months later, I can't remember the exact date. I do have the date somewhere. A relative called me up and said, you know, John, we need to have breakfast, really to celebrate this tremendous honor that has been granted to you. And, you know, I was not going to refuse a breakfast. It was in a fancy hotel, so this was by a relative. So I decided to go for the breakfast. And halfway through the breakfast, an interesting thing happened is that he. He reminded me I knew that he was involved in a particular business. I won't go into the details of the business he was involved in with the government. He was a contractor with the government. And he reminded me that he was a contractor with the government and actually the government owed him a lot of money. So by that time the tenor of the breakfast had changed. But essentially he put it to me that, you know, John, if you made one or two telephone calls, my money which is stuck unfairly, unjustly, can become unstuck. And, you know, anyone who does a good thing deserves to be rewarded for doing a good thing because this is a big injustice that has been done to me for a long time. And you would be bringing justice to me, my family, our family. And you get the equivalent now about US$500,000. I was a bit. I'll be honest, I was confused, actually, because I wasn't really sure I'd heard what. I wasn't very clear what this fellow was saying because the way it was put, he said, you know, you'll get 10% of what is owed to me as because of this essential help that you need. When I did not respond, when I looked a bit confused, I think he Became confused as well, and pulled a gold Shaffer pen out of his own. His own gold Shaffer pen out of his pocket. He said, and John, this is for you. Just take this pen. So I took this pen and I went into my office and one of the. I think it was one of the first gift registers in the Kenya government, where I opened a gift register and I registered the gold Shaffer pen in the gift register. I still don't know where the pen is, but for me this was the first experience of the way corruption comes at you when you are in high public office. It's not in the dramatic, rough way that one gets when you're talking about extractive industries. It's a soft, gentle, easy way. I found myself in a situation where I was working for the President in whom I trusted. I had trust and faith. And we had agreed and I told him that the success in the fight against corruption was very much dependent on what he did rather than all the laws and institutions, the laws that we pass and institutions that we created. However, my faith, I came to discover, was misplaced. I'm still a believer that in most African countries, especially when you have a concentration of power in the presidency, high level, serious grand corruption emanates from. From the presidency. Nowhere else people can lie to you that the President has bad advisors. It's a very popular thing and I'm hearing it with regard to Afghanistan and other things. I don't believe that it is not true still. That said, I'll give you a bit about what corruption looks like when you're succeeding the fight against corruption or the fight against what anti corruption looks like when you're succeeding. One of the actions taken by the gentleman who is currently our prime minister, when he was at the time Minister of Roads and public works in 2003, 2004, was to demolish illegally built houses that had been built on road reserves. Kenya is the conduit through which traffic and goods and trade go into Kenya, into Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo, all go through Kenya. So we've had this bottleneck for a long time, which has been very unfair of us, where we have huge tankers and lorries in the middle of Nairobi behind vehicles that are taking children to school and people who are going to work and a petrol tank are taking fuel to Uganda. So we had a program of building bypasses across Nairobi so that this traffic didn't mix with our domestic traffic. That meant that we had to clear a lot of illegally built properties, a lot of the land that had been given out corruptly a lot of it, by the previous administrations had been built on. People had, in some places, built beautiful mansions on this land, which made it impossible for the government to build the bypasses necessary for us to have a truly regional road network. And so the decision was taken that we are going to demolish these properties. And there was a discussion as to how this was going to happen. And it was decided to start, let's start in the richest part of Nairobi by demolishing an illegally constructed house, a house which had been constructed on a road reserve. And we went there with. Led by the minister. And there was media. There was some excitement about it. Obviously, the bulldozer knocking down somebody's beautiful mansion is good media. But then we also knew we had to, in the afternoon, go to one of the poorest slums in Nairobi, which had grown up on a road reserve. And so we had some policemen with us, a platoon of policemen to assist us just in case things got a bit ugly on that side of town. In the upper side of town, the rich rushed to lawyers downtown. We were concerned that they would resort to more direct measures against us when we got there. And this, for me, remains one of the most moving moments I've had in my entire time in government. We got there, the big slum off one of the main highways, going to a place called Thika in Nairobi, just in Central Province, next to Nairobi now Thika County. We no longer have provinces in Kenya now. And what was impressive is that we didn't need the policemen. We found that the poor were taking down their own houses. You know, they were basically tearing them down. And so we stopped and we were a bit confused. And the people told us, we have heard what you have done up there to the rich people up there in Kittisul, that you've knocked down houses there as we will take down. Let us finish today. We'll take down the houses. You build the road. We know what you're doing. This is development. You're doing good work. And this, for me, was a very moving moment. So we didn't actually need the policeman here. And for me, that is anti corruption at its very, very best. I'll give you another anecdote later, but. Or maybe now. This spirit that Kenyans were imbued with lasted really until around August, July, August 2003. For a period in 2003, after the election of the new government, after the removal of the former government of former president Daniel Ara Moye, Kenyans were euphoric. Gallup judged us to be the world's Most optimistic people. In March of 2003, a poll of 65,000 people, no one was more optimistic about the future than Kenyans. We remain, I think, an optimistic people, but that was quite special. One of our early problems was that we had ordinary people arresting policemen across the country. And obviously senior policemen were at a loss as to what to do because you have a provincial police officer calling to say, I don't know, people here have brought me my men and they have tied them up. What do I do? And that's what anti corruption is supposed to look like when it's actually working. When ordinary people take it upon themselves to deal with it, however, that requires a level of trust and an amount of faith, which if dashed, means they retreat very quickly. But this was something that was happening. It was being reported in the media. It was happening across the country in the early months of 2003, and by the end of that year, it wasn't happening anymore. There are those who would argue that corruption is the African way. I would disagree. In fact, in African culture, crimes against property were often, often caused the most harsh repercussions. I don't know, professor, whether it's the same in Malawi, but if you are on a journey and you are walking through somebody's farm, a long journey, you could stop. And if you are hungry, you could take bananas or whatever and eat them right there and then keep on moving. And that's a culture. And I don't know whether it's the same in Malawi, but in many communities in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South, it's the same. So long as you don't carry, you don't take away the food. So long as you're just dealing with your immediate hunger because you're on a journey, no one can stop you. However, if you stole a cow, the punishment was almost more severe than if you got into a fight with somebody and broke their arm. The punishment for crimes against property were always extremely severe. So I've always been very. I've always opposed this idea that there is some cultural proclivity amongst Africans towards corruption that is there and cannot be done. I'd say it's rather the opposite. We had during the colonial period, a time when the colonial administration gave a lot of power to chiefs, if you can call them that. In a country like Kenya, large parts of Kenya, we never had chiefs. We, you know, communities were managed by groups of elders, but some of them were created into chiefs, those who showed the most loyalty and they were given the power to prosecute the mandate of the colonial Government. And this gave them the power to do a range of things, really, to abuse the authority, to accumulate land, livestock, to steal people's wives and daughters. This was something that was very, very common in parts of Kenya during the colonial period. So impunity was something that goes back some way as an instrument of governance at the local level, combined with the use of disproportionate levels of violence that when there is a. When somebody turns against the state or does something that is against the interests of the state, the violence that is meted out is always disproportionate. You still see it in many parts of Africa, the police coming down on ordinary people with tremendous ferocity. It's a demonstration, 10 people killed. We had the recent one in, I think in Niger, where it was really Guinea, I think, where it was hundreds of people killed, a lot of people raped. And it's part of the reason we. In many parts of Africa, except South Africa, you don't have Million Man March. You don't have these peaceful. I love watching these demonstrations you see in other nations and other places of people holding candles. 10,000 people with candles, 1,000 people walking peacefully somewhere. That doesn't happen very often in many African countries because the response is immediate, extreme and disproportionate. That's my muddled way of giving a bit of history about Kenya and corruption and also a bit about myself and my attitude towards corruption. So I don't believe that corruption is intrinsically an African American issue. It's something that we assumed and became experts at. But given the opportunity, Africans are willing to use all the energy to fight against it. Let me talk about what's happening, the current realities in. In a place like Kenya now and what I would argue caused someone like me or me to make the choices that I made. I think, professor, if I had stayed in government, I wouldn't be here. I would be a rich man. I would not really. I would not have had to come by the tube, really, to London School of Economics to talk. But I think there are more important things happening in Kenya and across Africa. And I think the most important thing that's happening in Kenya and I think across the continent of Africa is that we're in the middle of a. Of a national crisis, of a youth bulge that is unprecedented in our history. 80% of Kenyans are below the age of 34. Almost 50% are below the age of 20. What should be the engine that will drive us economically and politically into real powers in this century? Currently, the posture is that of a crisis. And the majority of this bulge population of about 40 million, and some talk about 80% of that. And the population is growing at about a million a year. In 1986, our formal sector employed 80% of the workforce, the informal sector 20%. By 2006, just 20 years, the formal sector employed about 21% and the informal sector 80%. And my informal sector include, you know, driving through the streets, you see young people who are selling you trinkets and other things made in China that they have managed to get. That's the informal sector. The informal sector employs more people than the formal sector and the agricultural sector combined. And if you look at all the literature on Kenya, it talks of Kenya as an agricultural country. The informal sector, this sector where people are working on the verges of legality, really on the margins of legality, employs 80%, and the majority of them are young. This is the crisis that we face and that we've got to deal with constructively or begin to deal with constructively within the next 14 to 18 months, as we come up to the next elections in Kenya, we have to begin dealing with this. Otherwise, as I discussed with some business people two weeks ago, they're going to burn us out of our Range Rovers. Because these youth that we're talking about are culturally globalized in their expectations and aspirations. They're globalized. Doesn't matter where they are. Whichever part of Kenya they are, they have mobile phones, they listen to radio, FM stations, tv, you know, all the rappers that you know, they know, you know, I mean, that's how immediate it is. All these viral phenomena in social networking they're tapping into. And so they globalized in a way that is unprecedented in Kenyan history. When these expectations and aspirations of theirs are dashed, their problems or their challenges fall into three categories, which are easily politicized by elements of the elite that I described before and also easily militarized, turned into violent things that caused the kind of explosion that you saw in Kenya in 2007, 2008. And there are three categories of issues that are confronting Kenya today. One is what I call the identity issues, the politics of identity. And under this, we have three. You can disaggregate this into three categories. Number one is ethnic, tribal. Number two, religious. That's becoming more and more a bigger issue, especially as the war against terror and counterterrorism becomes a problem that we are sharing with or collaborating with the west in dealing with is becoming an issue. And also clan politics. The second bucket of issues are to do with governance and that has a whole range of issues that you, you can put in that particular bucket. But I'll put two as challenges that are important and are going to be pressing over the coming 14 to 18 months in Kenya. The first one is inequality, not poverty. Inequality, I believe poverty is. I put in a different. Poverty and equality are different, but inequality, especially when it is accompanied by conspicuous consumption on the part of those who are the beneficiaries of corruption. So inequality and corruption are the two primary issues with regard to governance that we face and have to deal with. And then finally we have a bucket of issues that are under what I call livelihood, employment, water, health, education and security. I spent a year traveling the country from the end of 2008 until roughly the end of 2009. And that's been ongoing ever since as well. Where I spent time living in the villages and getting a sense of what people were thinking and feeling. And what struck me was that the most pressing issues amongst especially the youth aren't water, not education. The most pressing issue is security, unemployment. So those are the two most pressing issues. Just give you some of the statistics that. Put into contrast some of these inequalities that have become very real for the youth in Kenya and makes this a time bomb that we are sitting on that we have to manage. Kenya between 2003 and 2007 was growing at 5.5% average. The stock exchange grew by 400%. In that time, we had free primary education introduced. 1.3 million children went to primary school for the first time who had never been to primary school. By 2006, the number of children in primary school had doubled from what they were just three years before. So you had massive infrastructure development program. So the sense in which, in terms of the hardware, the government was getting it right. Yet something was wrong. The majority of this 5.5% economic growth accrued the top 25% of the population in economic terms. Between 1998 and 2002, middle income residents of Nairobi endured an inflation rate of 28%, which rose to 39% between 2003 and 2007. Over the same period, 1998 and 2002, low income residents of Nairobi endured an inflation rate of 23%. However, between 2003 and 2007, it rose to over 70%. Driven by global factors. Food in particular, the price of food in particular was important, fuel and all that. And this remains the reality that people are living. This snapshot was replicated across the country and is stratified by region and ethnicity in a manner that Gives it and still gives it a political potency. What corruption means in this context changes dramatically and acquires a political currency that can be used to devastating effect around national political events and processes. Five. Let me give six important issues about the youth in Kenya. And I think this is true in many other African countries. Number one, partly as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1980s, beginning of 1990s, the reintroduction of political pluralism, it saw a proliferation of foreign funded non governmental organizations, the freeing up of the media, I mean the media boom across Africa, especially FM radio stations. Now this is in Kenya, I think the number went up in the late 1980s from around three or four to several hundred. Right now. In terms of FM radio stations, this has been hugely empowering. At the same time, it was accompanied by civic education programs that were supported by the government around multiparty elections in 1992, 97 and 2002. The irony of this is that it created such a huge empowerment that the state, which was not itself reforming, was unable to meet the expectations it was partly creating. Antisocial expressions of this empowerment are everywhere driven by inequality. Outwardly they exhibited by criminality. And inwardly, where this antisocial behavior on the part of youth consumes people, it's through the spread of social maladies such as drugs, alcohol consumption, prostitution become huge problems. And this has become, become a major problem in certain parts of Kenya. The other unfortunate thing is that violence is one of the most empowering thing to the youth. The post election violence of 2007, 2008 was equivalent to 1 million youth empowerment workshops. Because I was meeting youth who could set up a roadblock with their machetes and stop trade with Uganda, stop trade with Rwanda by setting a lighter tanker on the road. And I talked to them and they say, no, you know, remember, this is part of this 80%, 80% of 80% of population, 80% of whom are in the quote, unquote informal sector. An informal means basically you're hustling mainly to survive. And then you find yourself in a situation where the elections fail and you can actually have a roadblock where you can do what you want, you can take what you want. And it was hugely empowering for some of the youth. And you talk to them, they say, you know, we are the ones who put these ministers in the seats in which they are sitting today with the blood on our machetes. So it was empowering in a very profound but negative way. Secondly, employment is a national crisis, youth unemployment. Thirdly, it's been accompanied by an informalization of our politics. Because the post election violence in Kenya had one major effect, which was to delegitimize the state very dramatically. Because for a short while there, the state lost control over sections of the country, entire sections of the country. The security forces simply couldn't manage the violence, the looting, the carnage that was taking place. In the end, it took in fact, the intervention of the international community through the African Union and other international friends, Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United nations and a whole host of other foreign pressure to bring our belligerence together, to forge a national accord that led to the coalition government that exists in Kenya today. And that delegitimization has had a major effect on even the types of corruption that we see in Kenya. And one of the. One of the most striking. Two of the most striking developments have been, number one, the increasing influence of drugs and drug money in the political sphere. But if you talk in the political sphere, it's also a major social problem now. And number three, number two, informal youth gangs have great currency now. They have tremendous currency. I remember spending time in the flavellas in Brazil, in, in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. And I was struck how up in the flavellas during the day it was ruled by the gangs. And if it was one gang, you couldn't wear a blue shirt. If it's another gang, you couldn't wear a red shirt. They ran it and the military police would come in every once in a while, kill several young people. But this was ruled by them. And that's the process that we are also seeing in Kenya. The other important issue to keep in mind is that we often think of Kenya and many other African countries as rural, agricultural. I am increasingly arguing against that. Our first president had a saying. Rudy Mashambani, go back to the land. President Kenyatta used to tell people, go back to the land, take till the soil and we prosper. Africa is one of the, if not the world's most rapidly urbanizing continent. We have some of the world's most rapidly growing cities, places like Lagos and others. But Africa is urbanizing rapidly. Even where the urbanization isn't physical, people are in a urbanizing in terms of aspirations and expectations. Young people don't dream of owning one acre of land, two cows, wife and two and a half children. Not anymore. They want the city. They want to go to the city. It's where the light. Where the lights are and where the energy is and where the vibrancy is. And that's the truth, regardless whether you are living in urban areas or the rural areas. So urbanization is a physical and also an existential reality. That said, and this is something that is important about Kenya is that despite all the difficulties that we've had, the last referendum on the constitution showed that Kenyans have a continued faith in democratic institution. Well, in democratic processes. People turned out in record numbers to vote yes for the new constitution and they had registered in record numbers to participate in that democratic process. I think a lot of Kenya's hope lies in that confidence. I'll jump through a couple of sections because I have a feeling they'll come up when questions are being asked and go to. And I'll tell you what I've left out. I've left out the section on the international community and its role in anti corruption. I have a feeling that question may come from this audience. I'll jump to Anti corruption in Kenya 101 and rush through that. The anti corruption strategies that were implemented by African governments starting from the mid-1990s had seven key elements. And they're all similar because they all came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reintroduction of multiparty politics and then IMF conditionalities and governance. And really it was a combination of Transparency International and the World Bank. When Mr. Jim Wolfenson, for the first time in the history of the World bank used the big C word, I think World bank presidents never ever mentioned corruption. It was called leakages. Yes. When you hear about approach program leakage or a program slippage, then it means money has disappeared. No one is willing to say somebody has stolen it. But I think it is an important moment when there was an important convergence when you had the creation of Transparency national in 1993 at the same time the leadership of Mr. Wolfenstein at the World bank and corruption jumped up to near the top of the global development agenda. And the anti corruption programs all had seven elements. Some of you may have heard me go through this before. The first one and by the way, and I always need to say this about this strategy, the first real anti corruption survey done in Africa was done by the former Prime Minister of Tanzania, Justice Joseph Scindia warioba in the mid-1990s. And he was asked by the President to go around Tanzania and ask Tanzanians about corruption and come back with recommendations. And he went around the country, produced our YOBA report, which I still think is the seminal report on corruption in any African country. And his recommendation is that if you want to fight corruption, you've Got to get the entire population behind you. Corruption has to be fought from the bottom. When ordinary people believe that it is in their interests to fight corruption because it's the only way that they'll be able to live a productive life and be able to fulfill all their talents. He was then invited for a World bank spring meeting and there heard for the first time some of what was in his report read back to him. But here I think it had been turned upside down and the first pillar of the fight against corruption became leadership. That if you want to fight corruption, the president, prime Minister must be the one to lead the fight against corruption. Which makes sense. I believe that for a very long time, totally that if you don't have president or prime minister, it doesn't work. I'm now a bit dubious about that. Having my personal experience and what I've seen also other friends go through. I think it's a combination of both that work. Secondly, you need to have legal reform. So a lot of countries starting in 1997, egged on by the IMF introducing governance conditionalities in its Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility loans. It cut off lending to Kenya and Cameroon because of poor governance. And that was the beginning of the creation of anti corruption agencies across Africa. Cameroon got off the hook quicker than Kenya and I'm not sure how. Why? Because in the corruption perception index we are in the same sort of ballpark. But they have oil and we don't. But that's when it started. And so anti corruption legislation was passed and ethics related legislation was passed defining conflicts of interest and that kind of thing. We also had a lot of institutional reform and a lot of it centered around creating anti corruption agencies across Africa, but also reforming the judiciary and other governance institutions, the legislature, et cetera. The third and important element, I think I've mentioned legal and I've mentioned legal reform and institutional reform. The other important element in this was the international community and international cooperation. Getting the. Especially when you talk about grand corruption, especially in countries that have extractive industries, oil, gold, etc. There is no grand. There's no grand corruption that takes place that doesn't include members of the service sector in the developed world. You cannot steal $10 million from Kenya, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda or any other country without the help of a lawyer, a banker maybe around here. And I'm serious about that. It's not possible. You really. It's the architecture. The architecture of grand corruption is usually perfected by the service sector in the West. So the international community is important. And of course the passing of The United Nations Convention against corruption in 2003 was a major milestone and we can talk about that later. The other key element in the fight against corruption was media and civil society. Giving space to media and civil society to mobilize public opinion against corruption. This has been a double edged sword. But the media remains the primary mobilizer of public opinion against corruption. And a free media therefore is essential in fighting corruption. Last but not least is the private sector. The private sector must be involved in the fight against corruption. Private sector is usually the primary party, together with government in corruption in developing countries across Africa. However, one has to keep in mind, and I don't want to sound cynical here, that for the private sector, corruption is a tax. You'll only hear the private sector complain about corruption if it becomes unpredictable or inconsistent. However, if the bribes are consistent and predictable, there's no complaint because it's a tax, they can plan it for it. Until not too long ago in some countries, like Germany, it was tax deductible as a business, as a legitimate business expense. And finally is transitional. The last element that in these anti corruption strategies was transitional justice. How do you deal with past corruption? And this is where many of us got stuck. How do you begin fighting corruption? Maybe you are a new administration. You have inherited a police force that is riddled with corruption, a judiciary that is infected with it. All the institutions and all the equipment that you have been given is rusty with corruption. What do you do? And this is very touchy area. I always get in trouble for saying this, but I think that part of the mistake we made is that we used the language of human rights discourse to deal with economic crimes. And a kind of human rights fundamentalism infected the economic crimes discourse. That, you know, we must deal with every case of corruption and you know, let's throw them all in, let's investigate everything, throw them all in jail. In truth, it's, it's much more difficult to do that in the case of economic crimes than it is with human rights abuses. Human rights abuses. People carry the scars on their backs, on their minds, in their hearts. For generations. The life expectancy of grand corruption is about 25 years. The more you steal, the shorter the shelf life. If you steal 10 million in 25 years, it will have filtered away in the public imagination. Files will have gotten lost, judges will have died. Prosecuting it will have become that much more difficult. If you've stolen $100 million, you're a member of parliament with a billion dollars, you might be the president. So economic crimes are very different and one has to use different instruments. I've always argued that at some point you've got to be ready to bite the bullet and swallow the painful pill of granting an amnesty to some of those who have engaged in corruption, so long as it is accompanied by restitution, so they pay back by lustration, so they can never serve in public office ever again. And there's transparency about it, so the ordinary people know that this is happening. Otherwise, the best arena for the corrupt is the courts. They love going to court. Their lawyers will always be better paid than the government's lawyers. And prosecuting grand corruption, even here in the uk, in other mature democracies, is difficult, especially grand corruption. It takes years and years of trying to accumulate evidence and deal with the case. I think I'll finish by talking a little bit about Kenya's current constitution and the fight against corruption. Unfortunately, since or fortunately, depending on how cynical one is, corruption is the glue that has held the coalition together since it was created in the beginning of 2008. Because it created a level of inclusivity. It brought everyone to the table to be able to loot public funds without any part of the elite feeling excluded. What has been different is that this frenzy has been taking place accompanied by economic growth, even though that took a knock after the violence of the last elections. It has been decentralized and is inclusive by default as a result of the coalition itself. But as a result, it is also chaotic and it has the characteristics of a headless octopus because it seems to have many hands but no discernible head. As a result, we are witnessing the entrenchment of trends that include particularly pernicious forms of corruption that come with drugs, money laundering and other forms of organized crime. Eventually, these forces capture elements of the judiciary, and by capture I mean bribing, intimidating or killing make their way into Parliament. Own chunks of the executive cause havoc in the legislature, and in some arenas there is no discernible entrance between them and the security services. Ironically, in this context, the private sector is fairly happy after a while. I call it a corruption equilibrium where everyone knows what everyone is doing. They whine about it at dinner parties, but they realize this is the game that everyone playing. The big weakness in this scenario and why it is not sustainable in the long run in a country like Kenya, is because, thank God, we don't have any extractive industry. This corruption is dependent on either you're stealing tax dollars or aid money. And aid money is fungible. The more aid money you get, the more tax dollars you can steal. About three or four weeks ago, it was announced that Kenya's attempts to find oil in a place north of Kenya and called Esiolo had failed. The Chinese government or Chinese companies had spent $34 million prospecting for oil there and they failed. I for one celebrated that day. I don't think that we Kenyans are at all ready for oil. I'll close with three scenarios with regard to the new constitution. And with this I'd like to thank my friend Ashish Shah of Kenya and of Oxford University and who came up with these provocative scenarios. And we've been bouncing them back off each other. As you know, Kenya recently passed a new constitution and this has created for us a moment of hope that we have to capitalize on pretty quickly. Here One argues that a constitution is creating a government of the people, by the people and for the people. But in Kenya we are instead faced with multiple constitutional scenarios. This may sound cynical, but the fact remains that the larger pressure for constitutional reform was a result of the post election violence agreement on 4th of March 2008 which was overseen by the international community. Agenda 4 of this agreement was a donor driven agenda, was as much a donor driven agenda as it was desired by Kenyans. So we had a convergence of interests. The Kenyans wanted a new constitution, but the people who really pushed and tipped the edge were the international community who said you must make sure this happens. This does not. I don't want to under play on the gate the calls of many Kenyans who had suffered and died and been pushed into exile in the struggle for a new constitution really since the end of the 1980s, the beginning of the 1990s. But when push came to shove at this last moment, it was international community that said this is something that you must do. Our first scenario is likely in the short run. It's government of the people by the elite for the donors. And this is delivered in the form of a new constitution that creates a sense of euphoria amongst the people which we have. We are genuinely as Kenyans, excited about the new constitution. We believe that there's a new dawn. And I think that possibility does exist. We can lose it. And the political elite buys time and support from the donors and it diffuses donor pressure for reform. The second phase of this scenario is a government of the political elite, by the political elite for the donors. Here we envisage a political elite that will succeed in attracting immense donor funds in the name of constitutional reform and implementation, but use these funds to consolidate and redesign the emerging political dispensation to suit their needs. More donor funding and the fact that Kenya is that in Kenya aid is highly fungible will allow the political elite to use tax resources for purposes of political consolidation. During this phase, resources are used to capture the citizenry as the new political institutions are created to expand the number of political vacancies available. Half hearted reforms, manipulation during the constitution of the new judiciary undermining the independence. And paper based reforms create the mask of portraying progress towards democratic ideals when in reality new political consolidation and design is taking place funded by donors. The third phase of this is the government of the political elite by the political elite for the political elite. And here Kenyans and the donors discover yet again that the political and governance system that has emerged doesn't really change the status quo significantly. And networks of corruption and patronage continue in this new form at all levels of the political dispensation. And in fact new networks are created. Inequality and poverty continue to rise as ordinary citizens see a worsening of their daily lives. The second scenario, and I won't go over the first phase of it which is the same where as a new constitution, great excitement. The second phase again is the same with the government of the elite by the elite for the donors where these resources are used to consolidate. But phase three of this second scenario sees. A situation where the elite is able to hoodwink Kenyans only for a short time that reforms are taking place. But as time passes, Kenyans get more agitated by the lack of reform and the lack of tangible change in their lives as citizens. As poverty and inequality continue to rise. And here we would envisage yet another rise and surge in identity politics being played out in the form of clan, ethnicity and religion. The political elite manipulate the people to consolidate their power. This would be accompanied by pockets of violence in different parts of Kenya. And here I'm talking about this happening before, in the next, before the end of 2012. And so we'd expect surges of violence to maintain political dynasties and order to divert the attention of Kenyans from the nature of inequality created by the political systems. There's a final scenario which I think is the one that I would like to think is going to be the case. It's an ideal one, it's a long run, One new constitution is delivered. The excitement that we are enjoying is there, but and this is most important over the next eight months, and I mean literally eight months from a month ago, We have a government of the people by a strong independent judiciary for the people to hold the government to account, to the new constitution and in particular the Bill of Rights. To gain faith in the strength of the new constitutions, Kenyans hope and will rely on a renewed independent and impartial judiciary to abdicate, to adjudicate on its behalf. In this scenario, we envisage a cleanup of the judiciary that manages to insulate itself from political influence and leads to a more autonomous judiciary and will not make rulings in favor of the political executive. We envisage Kenyans being able to access and utilize judiciary to challenge the political elite from manipulation. And we expect the judiciary to deliver verdicts that demonstrate the primacy of the new constitution. And here we would witness the first significant corruption related prosecutions. And we would applaud the removal from office of those who incite hatred or abuse of office. And we would witness a gradual change in the culture of politicians who have demonstrated to. We witness a gradual change in the culture of politicians who have to demonstrate their accountability to the Kenyan citizenry. In the absence of an independent judiciary, no Kenyan will have faith in holding political elite accountable in the new constitution. So we have three pieces of legislation that are coming up I think are going to be before Parliament in the next couple of weeks. One is the Judicial Service Commission. One is a piece of legislation on the vetting of judges. Another one is on the creation of a committee to implement the constitution. How those are managed is going to have a big impact on the kind of Kenya we're going to have. Our vigilance and the vigilance of all of Kenyan's friends is very critical at this time. If we miss this boat, then we will face very choppy waters ahead. Otherwise, like a typical Kenya, I am optimistic about the future. We refuse to be pessimistic as Kenyans, partly because we believe in Kenyan exceptionalism. We were very upset when after the 2007, 2008 election violence, fellow Africans from Somalia, Nigeria, Uganda would come up to us and say we are very sorry what happened to you people. And that bugged us. That really, really bothered us across ethnic lines. And I would like to think that it's that kind of spirit that will carry Kenya through. Thank you very. Much.
