‘They are starving people, getting money from our pockets’: In Kenya, bribes are a daily necessity

Nairobi’s central business district bustles with shoe shiners, hawkers selling food and phone credit, and conductors and drivers seeking passengers for stretches of parked matatu minibuses and boda boda motorbikes that will soon spread far across the city.

While prices are bargained over and debated, there is an undercurrent to business here: the bribes being slipped into the hands of security officers and officials. It’s this endemic, low-level, corruption that Kenya’s impoverished complain keeps them poor, though most don’t expect the country’s new government to do much about it.

[ Kenya’s new president William Ruto says he will engage with legal challenges but wants to move country forward ]

[ Kenyans worry about economic impact as Raila Odinga rejects election results ]

Kenya held a presidential election on August 9th that resulted in a victory for outgoing deputy president William Ruto. The 55-year-old self-declared “hustler” comes from a modest background but has risen to become one of Kenya’s richest men. His narrow win is being challenged in the country’s supreme court, but most Kenyans are keen for business to get back to normal. They are preoccupied with doing enough to get by, even as many hope that a new administration might make things fairer for them.

Kelvin Njoroge, a 34-year-old matatu driver, says he’s been working for 15 years “but I don’t have anything because of bribes. We have a lot of problems because of policemen and the city council.” He estimates that he pays 800 Kenyan shillings (€6.60) to the police each day and 500 shillings to the council. “I’ll be happy if they stop it.”

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Njoroge waves at a policeman approaching a shop owner across the street, before directing his ire at the politicians. “They are starving people, getting money from our pockets. They are so rich. I ask the government to remove all those guys and give them hard jobs like sweeping roads.”

A 31-year-old businesswoman walking past, who asks not to be named, says she would like to see anyone involved in corruption publicly and severely punished. “[For] stealing from poor Kenyans you must be jailed. Now, it’s not happening.” She has been aware of corruption throughout her whole life, she says, pointing out that getting a birth certificate, passport or other documents involves bribing someone, as does getting any kind of white collar job. “We were born with this… Only God can save Kenya now.”

Another man, standing nearby, complains that the size of expected bribes has been steadily increasing. “It’s gone from kitu kidogo [Swahili for “something small”] to kitu kubwa [”something big”].”

Corruption is not happening at a low level only, and the money involved is significant. Outgoing president Uhuru Kenyatta has said publicly that the east African country loses about two billion Kenyan shillings (€16.5 million) of public money each day to corruption. In 2021, Kenya ranked 128 out of 180 countries in the world in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Extremely unequal

Kenya is an extremely unequal society, with an Oxfam report finding that less than 0.1 per cent of its population own more wealth than the bottom 99.9 per cent. After the Covid-19 pandemic, wealth information provider Wealth-X, which is quoted by Oxfam, said the richest two Kenyans owned more than the poorest 16.5 million people.

‘The court of law should be for all people equally. A lot of bribes are being given to leaders, especially in the court of law’

In the capital city, Nairobi, extreme wealth disparity is clear. While more than 60 per cent of the city’s population live in overcrowded, informal settlements, others reside in huge houses with guards and servants, eating out in the city’s many expensive restaurants, shopping at malls and drinking at colonial-era country clubs. Kenya has one of the fastest growing “super rich” populations in the world, according to Oxfam, with 7,500 new millionaires set to be created in a decade.

“The problem is the government themselves. The leaders are corrupt,” says Steven Mutua, a 29-year-old petrol station manager who works on Nairobi’s outskirts. “There are a lot of remedies. The court of law should be for all people equally. A lot of bribes are being given to leaders, especially in the court of law.”

Cyrus Mwangi, a 33-year-old customer service attendant, says he would like to see officials who have stolen money paying it back. “They should look at how ordinary Kenyans are living and see the state of the economy,” pipes up mechanic Steven Omondi (32), who is standing nearby.

Before the election, Ruto told the BBC that he had a solid plan for dealing “firmly, decisively and conclusively” with corruption. This would include better funding for the judiciary, enabling them to resolve corruption cases in months instead of years. “Entrenched, chronic corruption that has taken over institutions and turned the whole country into state capture” would be dealt with, he said.

After his initial victory, in a speech given to his party’s elected officials and their allies in the back garden of his large home in Nairobi, Ruto said he would run a “transparent, democratic but accountable government”.

Attendee Kipchumba Murkomen, who was elected for a third term as the senator of Elgeyo Marakwet county, says tackling corruption is among the “top three issues” the leadership is prioritising. He says he is certain that this will be a “very open government” where “every shilling” is accounted for.

“We are very committed to deal with the biggest form of corruption, which is state capture,” he continues. “The use of high offices – the presidency, the cabinet secretary offices – to facilitate business for individuals will be a thing of the past. Mr William Ruto is a man of his word.”

Whistleblowers

In an office inside a guarded compound in an upscale Nairobi neighbourhood, Transparency International runs a drop-in legal advice centre – one of four nationwide. A few hundred people attend annually. Many of their cases involve corruption around land ownership, abuse of office or service delivery. Some whistleblowers make an initial call but then get frightened and cut contact.

Often, the lawyers’ advice is to report incidences of corruption to the police. They can only offer further legal support for cases deemed to be in the public interest.

Speaking in her upstairs office, Sheila Masinde, Transparency International Kenya’s executive director, says if Ruto does get sworn in, “the worrying factor is that both him and his running mate have been implicated in corruption… And therein lies the question: how strong will the political will be to tackle [it]?”

Ruto has been accused of corruption and land grabbing by his critics, but he denies the allegations.

In July, Ruto’s running mate, Rigathi Gachagua, was ordered by a Kenyan high court to refund 202 million Kenyan shillings to the state after Judge Esther Maina found he could not prove how he had raised the money. Gachagua condemned this as a “sham trial” aimed at undermining him, with his lawyers saying the money was for goods and services he had provided to the government.

Masinde expresses the hope that under the coming administration, anti-corruption institutions and oversight institutions, the Kenya Revenue Authority, the police, Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and the judiciary, will all get more support.

She adds that she would like to see the new government implementing leadership and integrity provisions from the constitution, which would bar people from holding political office when corruption cases have been taken against them or they have been “embroiled in ethical breaches”.

In early June, Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission announced it had a list of 241 people who should be barred from running because of their ties with corruption allegations, but by late July only five had been disqualified.

“If we don’t have ethical people in public office, it doesn’t matter what we do,” Masinde says.

Doubly victimised

Poorer Kenyans are being doubly victimised, she continues, because public money is going missing instead of providing services they need. They are then forced to pay to access services.

Masinde would like to see the private sector, civil society and other non-state actors given the ability to closely monitor large government infrastructure projects, and urges that more information be made public about who owns which companies. “At some point, you realise that government is doing business with government,” she says. “There’s always that concern as to whether we are getting it at value… What inflates the costs is corruption.”

Over the past decade, Kenya’s public debt has surged, climbing to around 9 trillion shillings (€74 billion) from two trillion when Kenyatta came to power in 2013, with Ruto as his deputy president. Debt now stands at 67 per cent of Kenya’s GDP. This makes the missing corruption money even more painful.

“We say that a [Kenyan] child, by the time they are born, they already have a certain amount of money that they owe. They’ve hardly breathed their first breath. But they really owe a lot of money because of the high level of public debt in this country,” Masinde says.

‘I have to pay many bribes to survive in Kenya. I pay every day, there is no limit... I pay minimum 10 policemen in a day’

Back in Nairobi’s central business district, workers are debating whether it is even possible to clamp down on corruption.

“What can I say? I don’t know what the government can do because corruption cannot stop in Kenya,” says one matatu driver, who does not want to be named. “I have to pay many bribes to survive in Kenya. I pay every day, there is no limit, up to 2,000 [Kenyan shillings – €16.70]. I pay minimum 10 policemen in a day.”

Dennis Mwaura, who works at a stand selling food on the side of the road, says he pays about 500 Kenyan shillings each day to city council representatives. He earns about 650 shillings (€5.40) for a 13-hour shift.

One evening, the 21-year-old recalled, he was going home after his long shift, eating roasted maize with his earphones in, and didn’t hear a policeman speaking. Mwaura says he was forced to hand over 500 shillings – almost his entire daily wage – to the officer as a punishment for “ignoring him”. “If they stopped the corruption, this country would go far,” says Mwaura, who is trying to save money so he can study catering.

‘Politicians steal’

“Corruption is the big problem in Kenya,” says Daniel Schara (37), who works as a shoe shiner. “Poorer people and the mwananchi [common man] suffer more from corruption.”

“They enrich themselves,” he claims about city council representatives who, he says, demand 100 Kenyan shillings (€0.80) daily, on top of the fee for his official permit. Giving poorer Kenyans more freedom to do business would improve their quality of life exponentially, he says.

“Politicians are very rich, they steal. It’s annoying,” he adds. “We feel frustrated because they’ve stolen from us. Politicians are only seen during election time campaigning. After that, they disappear.”

He says the low salaries paid to the Kenyan police force and military result in them extorting civilians as a means of recouping the money they paid to be recruited

Schara says his brother once tried to join the military but was asked for a bribe of up to 300,000 Kenyan shillings (nearly €2,500). “We could not raise that so he was not successful.”

Another interviewee gives the same figure as the demanded bribe to become a policeman. He says the low salaries paid to the Kenyan police force and military result in them extorting civilians as a means of recouping the money they paid to be recruited.

“Corruption is a challenge we do experience sometimes, and as a law enforcement agency we do tackle it alongside our partners,” said Bruno Shioso, a spokesman for the Kenyan police. “We also have robust interventions and strategies of tackling petty graft. All in all, such instances are isolated and at personal levels, not systemic and not condoned.”

He said corruption during the recruitment process was “an external issue posed by organised cartels who prey on vulnerable jobseekers”.

Nairobi’s city council and the Kenyan ministry of defence did not respond to a request for comment.