How corruption kills investment and jobs in Kenya

NAIROBI: You have worked hard to identify a suitable commercial property for development. You have also been negotiating a facility with your bank to develop a 10-storey residential property comprising 40, three-bedroom units once you conclude the purchase.

You have even gone a step further and produced building plans for the property. As soon as you finalise the purchase, you submit the plans to the relevant authorities for requisite approvals.

The documents are received and you are advised the approval (or lack of it) will be communicated back in a month. It's now six months later and still no response from the said office. You are being taken back and forth, certainly to get you to pay the right bribe for the approvals.

You are a principled person who doesn't believe in paying a bribe (not because you can't afford one, you simply don't believe in doing so) and so for more than a year you are still waiting for the approvals.

On one of the afternoons, queuing in the office awaiting the now familiar response from the approval office, an officer serving in a slow, lousy manner, while flipping pages of the day's papers, yawns and says to his desk mate, "My sister's son is staying with us after high school and hasn't got anything to do; might you know anywhere he can find even casual employment for a few months?"

This is a scenario that plays out daily in many offices around the country, as Kenyans seek approvals or permits to engage in various investments and businesses in the country. What's even more dumbfounding though is that these officers don't seem to appreciate the correlation between growing unemployment and their contribution to it.

A while back, the media reported that thousands of building plans were piling up in a certain county government's offices, with backlogs going back many years. It got me thinking - how many jobs in terms of building personnel, how much business in terms of material and equipment and generally, just how much lost opportunity do we suffer as a nation after locking down so much investment?

In today's world, attracting investment is a tough challenge. It is worse for a developing African nation with all the bashing and negative investment reviews we continue to receive in most investment capitals of the world. How then can we allow corrupt networks to continue holding back the investments being implemented when some daring souls, both local and international, have borrowed many times in high interest regimes, because they believe in the future of this nation?

This is why efforts by President Uhuru Kenyatta to crack down on high-level corruption must be lauded and supported by every Kenyan of goodwill. However, I think we need more hands to win the war. It is not a distant fight, it is one that involves us and the future of our children. Whereas the President is fighting "white-collar corruption" through which Kenya continues to bleed billions of diverted development resources, there is an equally devastating "blue-collar corruption" as described above that continues to deny Kenyans the country they aspire for.

I recently attended a most depressing talk by an acclaimed international investor who has been attempting to make inroads in Kenya. Listening to his tales of corrupt officials used by business rivals to lock him out of the Kenyan investment space, I kept wondering, "What picture of Kenya does such an investor paint when he meets his peers in Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, New York, London or Paris?

Whereas agencies tasked with marketing Kenya as an investment destination are doing a great job, I keep imagining if I were an investor interested in any country, the first call I would make would be to other investors already in that country and those in the process of setting up to get a better feel of what it is like doing business in that nation.

In this regard, I'm afraid most of our investment promotions are being negated by both local and international investors doing or seeking to do business in Kenya.