Munene, Henry. "Why NGO Corruption in Africa is Unsettling." The New Times (24 Aug 20005).
The government of Kenya recently dissolved the NGO Council and replaced it with a caretaker committee that will, among other things, preside over elections within sixty days. The dissolution came hot on the heels of allegations of corruption within the ranks of Non-governmental organizations. Most unsettling were the claims that money from donors that was meant to go into helping HIV/Aids victims has over the years been plundered.
Now, in a country where the civil society, envoys from other countries, and even ministers in charge of justice are admitting that the ugly monster of corruption has broken free from its tether, this is quite alarming indeed. Alarming in the sense that, over the years, NGOS and other local organizations have come to be viewed as Africa's hope. A quick peek into the history of development planning in Kenya would show why NGO corruption would strike analysts as grave. At independence in 1963, the Jomo Kenyatta government in Kenya launched into a drive for economic development whose basis, among others, was foreign direct investment and strong economic ties in the East African region. The quest for foreign capital saw the country adopt a Non-aligned stand in the Cold War but with an obvious bias to the capitalist West, from where foreign investment and development aid has all along been mostly coming from. Indeed, the ties were so strong that, when Idi Amin overthrew Milton Obote through a coup in 1971, Kenya decided to see no evil lest the apple cart of the East African economy be upset.
By 1966,the economy of Kenya was bouncing at a GDP growth rate of 6.6 per cent. Over the years, the economic growth started trickling down to alarming levels until in the 1970s when the so-called Ndegwa Commission was formed to look into why poverty was ravaging an otherwise well-endowed land. Before the Ndegwa Commission, in 1965, a sessional paper on African Socialism in planning was prepared under which Kenya would map out the course of development in the country. In the following two years, development planning was decentralized into the rural areas through the so-called District Focus for Rural Development (DFRD).
But since the district focus for rural development operated under the provincial administration, a colonial relic which made the village chief more powerful than many other senior government officers, the politics of patronage and the fact that the DFRD bureaucrats were not responsible and accountable to the beneficiaries of development made the whole programme to fail to spur economic growth in Kenya.
Indeed, when poverty became even more acute despite the many development planning and poverty alleviation offensives, another Ndegwa Commission was formed in 1982 which recommended that the people be involved more in planning development projects in the rural areas in Kenya.
It was at this time that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Community -Based Organizations became the in-thing in East Africa. At this time, dictatorship in many African countries and its attendant corruption machineries were being fingered as the reason why the continent was not developing. The infamous Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) were introduced on the continent by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which recommended privatization of state parastatals, liberalization of trade and other measures as a way of preparing the continent for economic take-off. The idea was to take the development steering wheel from the government.
Politicians and government machineries were under pressure from all sides to let the organizations (read NGOs and CBOs) to liaise with the people, understand their problems and come up with proposals on how the people would come up with development projects that would be specifically tailored to meet their needs.
And when the government tried to meddle in the affairs of NGOs in the name of regulating them in Kenya, various NGOs came up with a self-regulating outfit called the NGO council. It was mandated to ensure that it recommended for registration only those NGOs that were-like Caesar's wife-beyond reproach. With time, the council slept on the job and behold, today briefcase operators are writing proposals and pocketing donor money and flaunting it in ways that are worlds away from what they are financed to do. As the Kenya example shows, it was because nobody trusted the politicians and bureaucrats in government with development funds that the NGOS stepped into the picture. But quite ironically, the only trusted channel of development has become the proverbial leopard watching over, so to speak, Africa's development cattle. Now, that is quite alarming for Kenya and, by extension, Africa.
