What is happening in the county government is organised corruption that involves internal coordination and vertical exchange of benefits.
Fraudulent legal fees claims on public institutions have become the new frontier for corruption.
Welcome to the world of the phenomenon described in Kiswahili as biashara ya karatasi (making money corruptly by shuffling papers). You don’t have to work.
The corrupt elite love these fraudulent schemes because the profit and margins are huge.
Secondly, even where the public institution you are working for is cash-strapped and not spending its development budget, you can still mint billions of shillings this way.
The dealings may be difficult to detect, prove, and deter. Your best bet that brisk business is going on is through tracking anecdotal evidence in ostentatious displays of unexplained and hurriedly acquired wealth by the nouveau riche and public officials who have just come to office either through elections of appointment.
And I ask: What is in the structure, operations, and functioning of the Nairobi County Government that makes this institution perennially amenable to fraudulent legal fees and claims?
According to the Auditor-General, claims of unpaid legal fees against this county government are at a massive Sh10 billion. Filings in a recent High Court case against the county came up with an estimate of Sh 21 billion of unpaid legal fees. The truth is that nobody knows the correct and accurate figure.
According to Governor Johnson Sakaja, he joined City Hall to find 872 cases and claims of unpaid legal fees amounting to Sh5.1 billion.
The governor says that he has appointed a legal fees verification committee that has brought down the claims to Sh 2.7 billion.
Clearly, determining the difference between the legitimate cost of lawful transactions and fraudulent fees against the county government has become difficult.
I found the move to appoint the five-member verification committee controversial because that decision amounts to appointing a poacher’s committee to advise you on stemming the incidence of poaching.
Internal lawyers of the county government cannot be part of the solution because they are part of the problem. When you give such wide and discretionary powers to such a small group and in an environment where the stakes run into billions of shillings, you have, perhaps inadvertently, just created a new bribery extraction point.
The persistent finding and conclusion of nearly all independent audits on the fraudulent legal fees at the county government has been that internal lawyers are part of the problem.
An audit by a former director of the Efficiency Monitoring Unit at the Office of the President, Erastus Rweria, arrived at the same conclusion about the culpability of insiders.
A 2007 audit by the defunct Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission attributed the problem of questionable legal fees claims to the following.
First, a highly discretionary, opaque and haphazard system of awarding briefs to external lawyers. Second, poor handling of cases by internal lawyers, third, negligence by internal lawyers in addressing court cases; and, finally, corruption.
In 2013, a former governor, Evans Kidero, appointed a 12-man task force led by prominent Nairobi advocate, Jenairo Kibet, to study the same issue.
The members of this task force included representation from independent institutions and stakeholders, including the Law Society of Kenya and the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya.
Comprehensive study
This team reviewed 2,528 cases of unpaid legal fees, interrogated representatives from 12 law firms whose claims represented 70 percent of outstanding legal fees, analysed the highest fees demanded, and looked at thousands of letters of instruction.
Reading this report, I arrived at the conclusion that this study by far represents the most comprehensive study of how the county government had been turned into the proverbial cash cow by insiders and colluding external legal practitioners.
What is happening in the county government is organised corruption that involves internal coordination and vertical exchange of benefits.
It is a game with its own network of operatives sharing not only rewards but risks. The leader must bribe his supporters and tolerate disloyalty and sub-optimal political support.
The writer is a former managing editor of The EastAfrican.
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