Each morning Wambui Kamau, the personal assistant to a Nairobi-based entrepreneur, boards a matatu taxi bus to get to the city centre. This morning, like every other, it is flagged down at a police checkpoint, where the driver hands an officer 100 shillings.
At lunchtime, Wambui heads to the Ministry of Immigration to pick up a new passport. It miraculously surfaces when she offers the clerk 100 shillings. Heading home, the matatu is stopped at the same checkpoint and another bribe paid.
Bad news awaits. A deed allowing the family to sell part of a plot has not materialised. The certificate costs 500 shillings, but Wambui has spent six months and paid 10,000 shillings in bribes trying to extract it from Nairobi city council. “You go to the office and it's always ‘so and so has the file'. It's an endless chain of people wanting to ‘eat'.”
Wambui (not her real name) pays up to five bribes a week. The anti- corruption group Transparency International reports that kitu kidogo (a “little something”) features in 54per cent of the average Kenyan's dealings with institutions. Six years after President Moi made way for an Administration sworn to clean government, Kenya is suffocating in sleaze. “The only difference in Moi's time,” Wambui says, “was that no one tried to hide it. Now people feel ashamed, but do it anyway.”
In the West, where we would no more dream of pressing a £5 note into a policeman's hand than we would tip our GP, we struggle to grasp the mundane reality of corruption in countries such as Kenya. The situation there bears out the saying that “a fish rots from the head down”. Generalised palm-greasing briefly halted after President Mwai Kibaki took power in 2003 promising that corruption would cease to be a way of life. Seated under signs reading “You have the right to free service”, petty officials no longer dared to make their usual demands. Since then, looting by their political masters has been so brazen that all restraint has gone. In the fight against graft, personal example matters.
And what a feeding frenzy there has been. John Githongo, the former anti-corruption chief and Kibaki appointee who made a permanent return to Kenya this month, fled in 2005 after realising that his ministerial colleagues were implicated in the $750 million Anglo Leasing affair, a scandal over inflated military contracts. Anglo Leasing almost seems distant history now, so thick and so fast have the fresh scams come.
A scandal over diverted maize reserves jacked up supermarket prices and emptied shelves, just when a drought put 10 million Kenyans at risk of starvation. A scam over fuel deliveries left petrol pumps dry and drove up transport costs. Members of the Kenyan diaspora, or anyone, like me, in regular contact with the country, will have experienced a sudden surge in e-mails and calls from friends and relatives begging for that Western Union transfer to ensure the family doesn't go hungry.
There is a weary inevitability to this explosion of corruption. In a system where every well-connected conman goes scot free, what else was to be expected? Anglo Leasing was in many ways Kenya's Watergate, only the Nixon character - Mwai Kibaki, who Mr Githongo says was fully aware of the corruption - refused to leave office, oversaw the rigging of the next election and reappointed corruption-tainted cronies to Cabinet.
Kenya was meant to have put such ruthless pillaging behind it. The coalition formed a year ago between Kibaki and Raila Odinga's opposition movement represented recognition that the “it's our tribe's turn at the trough” approach adopted since the days of Jomo Kenyatta had brought this nation of 48 ethnic groups to the brink of disintegration. The ruling party's crude vote-tampering after the 2007 polls convinced Mr Odinga's supporters that Mr Kibaki's Kikuyu people and their allies regarded the fruits of presidential office as indefinitely theirs.
At least 1,500 Kenyans died and 600,000 were displaced as mobs clashed with police and militias drove “foreign” tribes from coveted land. But all the wrong lessons have been learnt. As various commissions set up under Kofi Annan's guidance grind out worthy reports, fundamental reform remains a distant dream.
So does justice: Britain's Serious Fraud Office abandoned this month an attempt to probe Anglo Leasing, citing the Kenyan Government's lack of co-operation. Politicians who paid the men with machetes will face no domestic reckoning after MPs refused to approve a Kenya-based tribunal, delegating the problem to the International Criminal Court.
Kenya's rapacious elite is preoccupied with preparing for the next elections, almost guaranteed to be even more violent than the last. State resources are being plundered and every drop of available funding hoovered up as the parties build their war chests. Votes cost money, and so does arming militias to ensure that their funders' candidates win.
What the election crisis proved is that Kenya's “eating” culture, whether manifested in daily palm-greasing or the grand looting of the elite, does more than pour sand into the economy's workings and blight the aspirations of millions. It represents a fundamental rejection of the concept of the state as expression of the common will. In that cynical lack of belief sprout the seeds of civil war. Corruption destabilises societies. This is a lesson that the country's Western donors have yet to digest. Determined to keep aid flowing, increasingly anxious to find reliable regional partners, too often they minimise corruption, seeing it as a troublesome distraction.
Kenya was never the sepia-tinted paradise of colonial clubs and golden savannah that its Western visitors fondly supposed. Today it stands on the verge of a precipice.
Michela Wrong, the author of the forthcoming It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.