The publication of the Pandora Papers, a massive investigation to how world leaders and public officials use offshore tax havens to hide assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars has caused a bit of a stir in the country.
However, by and large, the reaction of the Kenyan media has served to shed more darkness on an already obscure subject.
Among those whose overseas financial arrangements have been exposed are the family of President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father, Jomo, was Kenya’s first President.
That the Kenyattas, and other political families, have been stashing massive sums of money abroad will come as no surprise to anyone with a passing knowledge of Kenyan history.
Easily the richest family in the land, there have long been complaints about how that wealth was (and continues to be) acquired and the revelations about where it is kept will simply pour more fuel on the fire.
Even before he became President in 1964, Kenyatta was known for his problematic relationship with other people’s money.
In the book Kenya: A History Since Independence, historian Charles Hornsby notes that as far back as 1947, people had noted Kenyatta’s “desire for money and difficulties in separating his personal financial affairs” from those of the institution he was running.
These would be traits that would attain full expression during his 15-year rule and beyond.
Functionally broke when he entered State House, by his death in 1978, his family would boast, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency, “extensive holdings of farms, plantations, hotels, casinos and insurance, shipping and real estate companies” with members of the family occupying major public office and influential posts in large foreign-owned industrial companies doing business in Kenya.
The family would also be deeply involved in the ivory and charcoal trade, which decimated Kenya’s elephants and forests, as well as in smuggling.
Today, they have fingers in almost every pie in the Kenyan economy and has continued to exploit its privileged position to milk Kenyans.
In 2017, one scholar described a partnership between the family’s bank and Kenya’s largest mobile service provider to offer extortionate mobile loans to the majority of adult Kenyans as “the extraction of surplus on a national scale for the substantial benefit of one politically connected family”.
Within the first 14 months of the arrangement, the bank was dispensing over 24,000 loans daily at an annualized interest rate of 90 per cent, and over 140,000 borrowers had been blacklisted by credit reference bureaus for defaulting on the loans.
Where does all the money extracted from poor Kenyans go?
Kenyans got a clue in 2007 with the leak of a report by the international risk consultancy, Kroll, by the whistleblowing website, Wikileaks.
In one of its first major scoops, the website released details of the 110-page investigation into the looting of Kenya during the regime of Daniel Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta in 1978 and had been commissioned (and buried) by Moi’s successor and Uhuru’s predecessor, Mwai Kibaki.
The report revealed how Moi’s family had created “a web of shell companies, secret trusts and frontmen” to funnel over $1.3 billion into nearly 30 countries, including the UK.
It is notable that the Pandora Papers leak has shown that the Mois and the Kenyattas shared the same consultants, from the private wealth division of the Swiss bank UBP, who helped them hide and stash their money overseas.
Given the above, it is surprising that Kenyan media has opted to frame the release of the papers as an issue of legality rather than ethics.
On air, journalists and politicians are talking up the advantages of investing in foreign countries.
The repeated refrain is that there is no evidence the Kenyattas broke any laws with short shrift given to questions about the advisability of allowing public officials to stash money abroad and hide their ownership of it.
When the Kenyattas and others who have relatively easy access to public money can effectively disguise what they own in a confusing, Matryoshka doll complex of foreign briefcase companies and foundations, how can the public ever trust that it is not being robbed?
The Pandora Papers could contribute to the discussion on wealth declaration laws as well as the culpability of Western professionals, banks and jurisdictions in enabling the accumulation and camouflaging of illicit funds by public officials and their families.
However, the media is squandering the opportunity.
