NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct-21 – Kenya has improved its bribery index ranking going down from third to fourth in East Africa where bribery is most rampant at 28.8 percent, according to the EA Bribery Index 2011 by the Transparency International.
Last year Kenya was ranked third, a position that has now been taken over by Tanzania where corruption has increased three percent from 28.6 percent last year to 31.6 percent this year.
Burundi leads in bribery prevalence at 37.9 percent while Uganda fell to second place at 33.9. Rwanda retained the most positive outlook at 5.1 percent.
Samuel Kimeu, the Executive Director Transparency International-Kenya who launched the report in Nairobi, said that the justice and law enforcement sectors across East Africa were the most notorious institutions receiving bribes.
At the institutional level, the police, the judiciary and revenue authorities across the different countries were poorly rated, with all the police appearing in the list of the top 10 most bribery prone institutions.
Kimeu has challenged East African countries to work hard to tame the vice and restore confidence in the justice and law enforcement institutions.
He said: “East African countries have a lot to do in terms of bringing back confidence in police and the judiciary, it’s not hard to see how the public perceive the fight against corruption if the two institutions are continuously in the lead of the bribery index.”
The Kenya police was the only institution ranked among the top 10 institutions in East Africa where corruption was prevalent.
Nevertheless, the police maintained the lead the institutions in Kenya where bribery as almost the norm at 81 percent, followed by the Ministry of Defence and the Nairobi City Council at 59.7 and 57.4 percent respectively.
The health and education sectors were also ranked adversely relative to the law enforcement sectors as the other most bribery prone sectors across Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda.
Kisumu Town East MP Shakeel Shabir who spoke on behalf of the African Parliamentary Network against Corruption urged stiffer penalties for the corrupt.
He said: “We write very good speeches about corruption, formulate good strategies about it but we do not need to go for the policeman who asks for a fifty shillings bribe, we need to fight grand corruption in a radical manner even execute in a park those found guilty like in China, why can’t we take some to Uhuru Park?”
Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino called on the government to invest more in the police so that the much awaited reforms can be realised.
“From this moment that this index has been announced everybody should be worried that the people charged with protecting them are the most corrupt, as a country we invest too much money in commissions like the KACC. The area where we should invest money is the police failure to which we will perish as a country,” he warned.
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