Visiting US Senator Condemns Corruption in Kenya

Excerpt from report by Kenyan KTN TV on 28 August

[Presenter] US Senator Barack Obama today described the corruption problem in Kenya as a crisis and warned that the freedom that Kenyans fought hard to achieve was in jeopardy.

Obama said that while corruption was not unique to Kenya, it had reached alarming proportions and was robbing the Kenyan people of opportunities to realize their full potential. KTN’s Peter Opondo covered Senator Obama’s lecture at the University of Nairobi earlier today.

[Correspondent] Senator Barack Obama was at the University of Nairobi to deliver a public lecture on governance. In a lecture titled “A hopeful government, a hopeful future”, Obama sought to demonstrate how lack of transparency in the successive governments in Kenya had undermined the country’s chances of achieving its development potential.

[Obama] The reason that I speak of the freedom that you fought so hard to win is because that freedom is today is in jeopardy. It is being threatened by corruption.

[Correspondent] The senator observed that while corruption was rampant even in developed countries, the situation here was such that it could only be labelled as a crisis.

[Obama] It is a crisis that is robbing honest people of the opportunities they fought for, the opportunities they deserve.

[Correspondent] The Illinois senator further criticized the current government which was elected on the promise of change, saying that while it had began on the right footing, it had slowed down the pace of reforms.

[Obama] Everybody says the right things before elections – I know I am a politician. People make promises all the time before elections. The question is, what happens after they’ve been elected? How are they behaving? Today, we are starting to see that the Kenyan people want more than a simple changing of the guard.

[Correspondent] According to Senator Obama, the other main cancer in Kenya is what he described as ethnic-based tribal politics.

[Obama] The notion that at this stage in the nation’s development there would still be politics primarily based on arguments between Luo and Kikuyu and Kamba and Maasai doesn’t make any sense. [Passage omitted]

(c) 2006 BBC Monitoring Africa. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.