CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

174 Syndromes of Corruption
Land thefts: using and defending personal power
Official impunity was clearest and most rapacious in the outright theft of
land from private citizens and the public (Klopp, 2000, 2002). Ministers,
political families, well-connected business people, and ‘‘local tycoons’’
with top-level protection seized valuable urban and rural land for themselves.
In a one-party system with a corrupt judiciary and a President who
could see that critics were ‘‘taken care of’’ there was little or no recourse.
In 1994, for example, land under Nairobi’s Westlands open-air market,
officially granted to the city council for exclusive use as a market,
was claimed in a private deal by developers headed by a Nairobi city
politician with KANU backing. Efforts by stallholders to buy the land
themselves encountered official resistance and ultimately failed. Most of
the vendors were Kikuyu, and were thus seen as threats to the local
KANU MP. In 1998 public lands in the Karura Forest just north
of Nairobi were handed over to developers; public outcry was to no
avail. The following year the Ministry of Lands, under pressure from
opposition MPs and human rights groups, revealed that over half of the
forest had been given to sixty-seven developers whom the Minister of
Lands and the Attorney General could not or would not name.
Information on almost a third of those firms had vanished from the
Registrar General’s office. MPs who sought to plant trees on some of
the seized lands were beaten by security guards. In 1997 Operation
Firimbi, a civil society protest against land grabs, documented over 250
such cases. Official Moguls and their protégés also carried out dubious
‘‘privatizations’’ of other public assets (Amnesty International, 2000;
Klopp, 2000; Human Rights Watch, 2002).
The land thefts (Klopp, 2000) are notable both for what they tell us
about the dynamics of Official Mogul corruption and for their effects
upon society. In some respects land-grabbing under Moi was an extension
of practices dating from the colonial era. In the short run, however,
both the Westlands Market case and the seizure of Karura Forest lands
reflected Moi’s personal power and determination to reward important
followers. Hope of access to such deals in the future would have been a
strong motivating factor for other Moi clients. Land theft was facilitated
by Kenya’s compromised judiciary and weak bureaucracy; victims and
critics seeking redress by political means had nowhere to turn. In both
cases valuable resources were converted into patronage and exploited
with few constraints.
The land-seizure cases also show how liberal reforms require a framework
of political and state institutions and support from civil society. As
Klopp (2000: 16–17) points out, the advent of competitive elections in