POLITICS-KENYA: State Targeting Ministers’ Lifestyle

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Jul 8 2006 (IPS) - The Kenyan government’s directive to have senior officials return luxury cars to cut costs may have been good news to tax payers, but lack of transparency and accountability could undermine the exercise.

The government is expected to save about 17 million dollars in running costs, which will be channelled to development projects, from the exercise.

The vehicles have been attached to cabinet ministers, their assistants and permanent secretaries.

To encourage transparency and accountability, a human rights group has urged the government to make known which minister had been allocated what number of cars and which ones, indeed, have been returned.

”A lot of transparency is needed in finding out who had been given what and a means to verify that, indeed, each minister is left with one car,” Maina Kiai, the chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), said. His organisation is a government-appointed watchdog.

In addition, Kiai is calling for punitive measures to be taken against defaulters. “Accountability is important. Those ministers and other officials who do not heed this call must pay a penalty. They should be fired from the cabinet because of flouting a government directive and breaking a code of conduct,” he added. In his budget speech (June 15), finance minister Amos Kimunya ordered ministers and their assistants as well as permanent secretaries to surrender extra state vehicles in their possession and keep only one official car.

Unhappy with the directive, some ministers have complained that they were not informed and are demanding a formal letter.

Despite the protests, more than 100 luxury vehicles have been handed back to the government this week. But only three ministers, including Kimunya, have returned their cars.

According to Kimunya, senior officials retain 11,000 vehicles plus 3,800 drivers who are on the government payroll. This translates to one driver for four vehicles, something which Kimunya described as unnecessary.

While the government plans to distribute some of the extra cars to needy areas, others will be sold. Even here, transparency becomes crucial. “Transparency is needed in the disposal of the vehicles. There should be a valuing system whereby the vehicles returned are valued through an independent valuer and the exercise made public so that Kenyans know how much they have fetched and where the money is going,” Kiai noted.

A new transport policy, signed by Francis Muthaura, the head of Kenya’s civil service, said senior official “will be entitled to one official vehicle not exceeding 2500cc for petrol propelled and 3000cc for diesel propelled engines.” The policy will be implemented with effect from July 1.

Analysts say without political will, the directive may run into difficulty, given a past experience.

In a budget speech in 1998, former finance minister, Simeon Nyachae, proposed to restrict the number of state vehicles for ministers and their assistants. The plan, which was received with hostility by some of his cabinet colleagues, never came to pass.

In a country where more than 56 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of one dollar a day, ministers have up to four or five luxurious top-of-the-range fuel-guzzling cars at their disposal. These are maintained at taxpayers’ expense.

“We are a poor country and it is wrong for people in government to exercise this kind of opulence. It undermines the government’s fight against poverty. It is in bad taste for senior government officers to move around with expensive machines which consume a lot of fuel, and which are purchased by taxpayers money,” said Kennedy Masime, executive director of the Centre for Governance and Development, a Nairobi-based non governmental organisation (NGO).

Most of the vehicles include top-of the-range Mercedes Benz, Volvos and powerful four-wheel-drives like Range Rovers, Land Cruisers, Nissan Patrols and Toyota Prados. The cost of one such Mercedes is about 190,000 dollars, while the Range Rovers cost between 148,648 dollars and 202,702 dollars each. Toyota Prados and Land Cruisers cost between 94,595 dollars and 135,136 dollars each.

Kenya has 30 cabinet ministers, 39 assistant ministers and 33 permanent secretaries, according to the website of the Office of Public Communications.

Most of the vehicles are not necessarily used for official purposes. Families of government officials use them for personal matters such as shopping.

In addition, government-registered vehicles are regularly spotted outside bars or other recreational centres at night or at weekends. The misuse of state vehicles has been criticised by human rights groups.

Last year, the Kenya Human Rights Commission, an NGO, named and shamed ministers who were said to be using official vehicles in campaigns during the constitutional referendum held in November 2005.

Similarly, the KNCHR, along with the Kenya Chapter of Transparency International, released a report early this year, criticising the wasteful expenditure in the use of tax revenues.

The report, ‘Living Large: Counting the Cost of Official Extravagance in Kenya’, showed how President Mwai Kibaki’s government, which came to power in December 2002, purchased high-end luxury vehicles in its first year in power.

“Between January 2003 and September 2004, the new government spent at least 878 million Kenya shillings (about 12 million dollars) in the purchase of luxury cars that were largely for the personal use of senior government officials such as ministers, assistant ministers and permanent secretaries,” said the report.

This money, the report says, is enough to see 25,000 children through eight years of school, or provide HIV/AIDS treatment for 147,000 people for a whole year. Of the estimated two million Kenyans living with the virus, 270,000 are in urgent need of treatment. So far, only 40,000 are receiving treatment in Kenya.

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