AIROBI, Kenya, Jan 27 – Kenya will continue to lag behind in the fight against corruption

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 27 – Kenya will continue to lag behind in the fight against corruption unless more culprits are punished and stolen public resources recovered. This is according to Transparency International (TI) which says despite a lot of activities by agencies like the Ethics and Anti Corruption Commission (EACC), many cases die out without tangible action.




TI Kenya Executive Director Samuel Kimeu has called for audits of the already handled cases that did not bear results especially at the EACC.
“We need to get our anti corruption system moving. It is true that we have gotten quite a number of cases in the courts in the last one year. But as I said, these numbers will only be meaningful if at the end of the day we are going to have convictions,” Kimeu said.
He was speaking on Wednesday while releasing 2015 global Corruption Perception Index(CPI).
According to the Index ranking the least to most corrupt countries in the world, Kenya is at position 139 out of 168 countries with 25 points. Comparing to 2014, Kenya has stagnated where it stood at position 145 with 25 points.
Kimeu said for Kenya to improve and change the public perception about corruption, there needs to be changes in independent audits of corruption complaints, lifestyle audits as well as implementations of anti-corruption recommendations.
“Kenya has maintained a poor score in the global Corruption Perception Index 2015 released by the Transparency International movement. Kenya scored on a scale of zero to 100, with zero perceived highly corrupt and 100 very clean, the same recorded in 2014,”Kimeu explained.
Kenya and Uganda tie at position 139 globally, with Uganda shedding one point from 26 in 2014.
But among the East Africa Community countries, Rwanda was once again the top performer with a score of 54 at position 44 globally with its score increasing by five points from 49 in 2014.
Tanzania follows with a score of 30 at position 117, dropping one point from 2014.
“Kenya can learn key lessons from the top performing countries. Generally they have high levels of press freedom, stronger access to information systems and budget transparency thus the public knows where the money comes from and how it is spent,” Kimeu said.
Denmark is ranked the least corrupt country in the world for the second year running with a score of 91, with North Korea and Somalia placed at the bottom of the pile with 8 points each.
The big decliners in the past four years include Brazil, Libya, Australia, Spain and Turkey while the big improvers include Greece, Senegal and the United Kingdom.