Kenyan President Fights Corruption With Direct Website Reporting
Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta has launched a website for people to report incidents of corruption directly to him.
Users can upload videos, photos and other documents and can choose from a long drop-down list of government departments to complain about. They can also report corruption to Uhuru Kenyatta by text message.
The campaign group Transparency International says people rarely report bribery and corruption in Kenya because they feel no action will be taken.
The East African nation is ranked 139 out of 176 countries on the group’s global corruption perceptions index.
“The president is committed to clean government and this site advances his intention to act strongly against corruption,” a presidential spokesman Manoah Esipisu was qouted
A few hours after its launch, Mr Kenyatta’s official presidential Twitter account tweeted: “Corruption reporting has started off quite well with a good number of well documented incidences being submitted #DigitalPresidency.”
Another website to tackle corruption in Kenya has already been set up by activist Anthony Ragui.
The president’s new website allows complainants to upload pictures and videos
People post their stories on the I Paid a Bribe site about bribery demands from corrupt officials and traffic police – and some also give surprising accounts of their honest encounters.
The site gives a running total of all the bribes its contributors have paid since the site began in November 2011.
With 3,529 reports of bribery, it currently stands at 125,584,332 Kenyan shillings ($1.4m, £918,500).
Last week, Transparency International’s East African Bribery Index revealed in its survey that only seven in 100 Kenyans will report or complain if they encounter bribery.
When asked why they did not report corruption, the majority said they knew no action would be taken if they did so.
“Of particular interest is that citizens do not seem to trust their governments to respond to the reports on corruption. We need to win citizen confidence if any of our efforts were to succeed,” Mr Samuel Kimeu, the executive director of Transparency International in Kenya, said in a statement.
President Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s founding president and one of the richest men in the country.
He won elections in March this year pledging to reunite the country following the disputed elections in 2007 and fight corruption.
