Twalib Mbarak: Why Kenya Has Been Unsuccessful In The Fight Against Corruption

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission boss Twalib Mbarak has noted that Kenya still has a long way to go in the war against corruption.

Speaking in an interview with Citizen TV, Mbarak said that the country has made significant progress in the fight against graft but it is difficult to attend to all cases in time because of the limited resources.

“One of the biggest problems we have is budgetary constraints. The money we are given is not enough. There is the issue of backlog, we are presented with over 5,300 cases a year yet we lack enough officers to assign to every case. a case is always assigned two officers. There is need to amend the law to have a threshold of which cases the EACC can handle but today we are in a very tight corner,” Mbarak said.

Aside from that, most individuals accused of corruption are of high social status who appear to be untouchable and ensure that their resources are equal to the prosecution’s.

“There are multiple issues that make us move very slowly in a corruption case. For the high level corruption case where the guy is untouchable or a ‘big fish’, he does not come with one lawyer, he comes with six refined lawyers in that case and everything you do you do is very systematic and we don’t have the calendar of events. Those things make the way we handle our cases very slow.

“In such cases the witnesses are compromised. A key witness involved in a case involved with millions of shillings and they are accused silently by being given something small to not appear in court. We have withdrawn cases as a result of witnesses disappearing,” Mbarak explains.

The EACC boss however blamed Kenyans for the many cases of corruption in the country.

This is because Kenyans always make wrong decisions when it comes to the choice of leaders they elect to office.

Mbarak said that whenever a corruption case is brought before EACC and DPP for probing, it always points back to the citizens.

“Many times, all the issues we found in the counties we are investigating are as a result of the citizen not doing a preliminary vetting of the type of person they are voting for. If we want to address corruption, we have to address the need to have a clean society culture, ” he stated.

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