The Corruption of Africa’s Darling

OLD FIELD, N.Y. — The name “Kenya” instantly brings to mind a land of wondrous wildlife and sweeping beauty. This is the country that boasts the Amboseli game reserve--where Ernest Hemingway, and Teddy Roosevelt before him, trekked on big-game safaris, hunting lions and leopards against the backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro--and a dreamlike stretch of the Indian Ocean coast where white sand meets turquoise water and coral reefs abound with fish.

Kenya boasts this and much more for the careful tourist--and careful should be underscored, because there is more to fear than the fangs of a lion or the horns of an angry water buffalo. At the game parks in recent years, robbers have been preying on any tourists unwary enough to camp alone. The U.S. State Department warns travelers not to venture on safaris except in convoys of at least two vehicles since highway bandits might attack. In Nairobi, the capital, armed robberies have occurred in broad daylight and visitors dare not venture from their luxury hotels after dusk without escorts.

Such criminality, so antithetical to the image that Kenya’s government strives to project to tourists worldwide, is but a symptom of a much larger problem. Any honest picture of Kenya must focus on its president, Daniel Arap Moi, whose autocratic and thoroughly corrupt government has reduced the nation of 28 million to poverty and desperation.

A presidential election at the end of this month may brighten Kenyans’ future under a new leader. Pressure from the international community, including a blow from the International Monetary Fund, which suspended a $220-million loan, forced Moi this fall to submit to a package of electoral reforms. They guarantee some basic liberties, allowing Moi’s political opponents to register their parties, appear on television or radio and to call rallies without police disruption.

But these reforms come late in the game and already have been violated; the president’s apparatus of control, ranging from cronyism to torture, remains intact; the opposition, whose contenders number more than a dozen, among them the first widely popular woman presidential aspirant, Charity Kaluki Ngilu, has not had the chance to coalesce. As a result, Moi is likely to stay.

When he came to power 19 years ago, much of the international community regarded Kenya as the darling of Africa, a stable country and desirable to foreign investors. That Kenya was a one-party state in which an African elite ruled much as the British colonialists had was not considered alarming, because the country seemed a civil and workable place. The reality now is that Kenya, a democracy in principle, is ruled by a grotesque system.

Wielding a baton much as a king might his sceptre, Moi dominates a hierarchy that extends from the grand State House to the village chief’s mud-walled abode. He controls the security police, the university, the civil service, the judiciary and provincial, district and local leaders. Those officials whom he does not appoint directly, he manages with bribes. Moi’s high-level loyalists are immediately identifiable in their Mercedes-Benzes, the status cars of Kenya. They are known as the Wabenzis, a wordplay using the tribal designation of wa.

The gap between rich and poor in Kenya is one of the widest in the world. Slums form an opposite suburb of Nairobi, uncountable shanties constructed of tin, cardboard, cast-off tires, hubcaps and any other detritus that can be reinvented into building materials. The smell of sewage permeates the air.

Although Kenya’s population growth has slowed, for decades it was among the fastest in the world. This forced generations of farmers to divide and redivide their lands, impoverishing rural areas and forcing landless offspring into the cities. During Moi’s presidency, Nairobi’s population boomed from 300,000 to more than 2 million.

Concomitantly, Kenya’s infrastructure has decayed. Roads are potholed, hospitals have no medicine, schools are overcrowded even as enrollment rates are falling and public edifices, like the Nairobi airport, are growing shabbier. The big tourist hotels have installed their own generators because of periodic blackouts on the public power grid.

Corruption begins with the post-office worker who doesn’t return change and escalates to criminals who buy off police and judges. The police demand money from passing drivers. Customs officials at the port of Mombasa collect bribes. Businesspeople buy illegal permits to construct shoddy buildings or make deals to steal the land out from under the slum dwellers.

The poor subsist on ugali, a corn porridge, as they work on plantations and cultivate Kenya’s world-famous coffee or tend vast acres of ornamental flowers, to be cut and sent in refrigerated planes to Europe’s salons. The average yearly income for a Kenyan is about $300.

No Kenyan lives unaware of the dangers of running afoul of Moi’s police. Human-rights groups have recorded a plethora of abuses carried out against common citizens, common criminals and political activists. The usual means of mistreatment is beating, sometimes to death, but Amnesty International’s most recent report includes a chilling list of torture methods. Prisoners and detainees, some charged and others not, have been threatened with death, burned, subjected to electrical shocks on their genitals, raped, sodomized and kept in holes progressively filled with water. Many detainees confess, which may explain why the number who die from torture is relatively small--17 last year, according to Kenya’s leading rights group.

Some Kenyans, in strictest privacy, debate the idea of rebellion to get rid of Moi. When the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo nearby was overthrown earlier this year, demonstrators took to Kenya’s streets yelling “Kabila!” “Kabila!”, the name of the rebel leader. But peaceful protest still is more the Kenyan style, as risky as that may sometimes be.

Indeed, to risk arrest by attending a political rally in opposition to President Moi takes bravery or desperation, or both. Last summer, 13 Kenyans were killed as police fired on anti-goverment demonstrations. No demonstrators have since been shot, allowing an argument that Moi has made progress in the past few months. Kenya, the argument continues, is in a political limbo between dictatorship and democracy and may move more toward a humane politics if Moi carries out some of his liberalizing promises after the election.

But after two decades of power-mongering, Moi is highly unlikely to mend his ways. More significantly, the Wabenzis--the judges, ministers, business elite, even the village chiefs who have staked their status on Moi’s stewardship of Kenya--will not allow him to relinquish power.

Until Moi does depart, the scene in front of the high-rise hotels in Nairobi probably will stay the same. Tourists stream down polished stairways in the mornings to board vans that will ferry them to the game parks, ignoring, if they can, the beggars who wait on the sidewalks, representatives of the city’s 20,000 homeless children and of its disease-ridden adults whose limbs are mangled by polio or eaten by leprosy. Periodically, the police sweep the sidewalks of these undesirables, but they will keep returning unless Kenya manages a true change.