Author: Arthur Okwemba
Date: January 28, 2007
Type of article: News
Source: The Daily Nation - only available online by registration and paid subscription fee

---

Kenyan taxpayers will wait longer to know what they have to repay in loans to foreign donors after the latest attempts by anti-debt campaigners to get full details from the Government hit a snag.

The campaigners, who have been lobbying to get access to an updated register for the last one year, have been furnished only with information on donor funding up to 2002 when Moi’s 24-year reign came to an end.

Speaking at the just-concluded World Social Forum, the inter-religious debt cancellation campaigners said they had to wade through a heavy bureaucracy, including writing officially to the ministry of Finance and holding several meetings with the debt management team, to get the information. 

“We lobbied intensely with various arms of the Government to get hold of the document. And since the people who were pushing for this access were religious groups, we managed to get the yet-to-be updated one,” said one of them. 

Although the debt register is a public document, one cannot get it at the Government Printers or access it easily at the ministry of Finance. One has to write officially to request for it, explaining why and for what purposes they need the information.

The Government is said to be reluctant to make information about public because the citizens will be empowered to question how donor money has been spent. There are cases where funds are indicated to have been used for certain projects, which cannot be corroborated on the ground.

Knowledge of how donor funds are used also enables the public to know how they are shared among regions.
“I think the public have a right to know how donor funds, which are later repaid using taxpayers’ money, are used,” said Mr Magnus Bruening of the Kenya Episcopal Conference, Catholic Secretariat.

The Kenya Episcopal Conference is part of the inter-religious campaign launched in 2005 by the Catholic Economic Justice Network to lobby for the cancellation of all illegitimate debts in various countries.

Since 2005, the civil society has been pushing for the register to be made public without much success. At this year’s World Social Forum, the campaign was taken a notch higher, with the faith-based organisations vowing to put pressure on the Government to provide an authentic and updated debt register.

Such a register would also indicate if donor funds were used in questionable deals such as Anglo Leasing.
“Much of the debts we are paying now ended in the pockets of individuals and never reached the intended beneficiaries. People need to know what happened,” said Mr Bruening.

Kenyan delegates at the WSF meeting said they suspect 80 per cent of the donor funds benefited the wrong people.

It is estimated that the country has over Sh700 billion debt, of which Sh400 billion is debt from domestic borrowing. More than Sh300 billion, owed to external sources, is being paid by the poor for services not rendered.

“Most of these debts have been turned into personal debts, with people being overtaxed in order to service them,” said MP Giyose, National Chairperson, Jubilee South Africa.

Others said only in cases where funds were genuinely and appropriately used for security issues can limited access be justified. Apart from identifying the illegitimate debts, opening up the debt register to public scrutiny would help in prosecuting looters. 

Illegitimate debts are loans taken by countries but did not benefit the public. Instead, they ended up lining pockets of individuals. Such money may also have been used by the Government to finance repressive activities against its own citizens. Such money is now being demanded from governments practising democracy.
Delegates at the meeting said most of the donor funds indicate, on paper, to have been used for certain projects, which are non-existent on the ground. 

“We are calling for unconditional cancellation of all illegitimate debts and reparations of the funds from foreign companies who benefited,” said Mr Giyose. 

“We are opposed to conditional cancellation of these debts since it is like closing one door and then opening another leading into punitive world. Once we have identified how much of the debt is illegitimate, then we can be in a better position to present evidence to the donors on why they need to cancel it,” said Njuki Githethwa of the Kenya Debt Relief Network.