Kenya’s anti-corruption war needs stronger pointmen at the grassroots

By Mr. Fredrick Kipchumba Chelimo – PWD

Email; fkipchelimo@yahoo.com

“The strength of any huge force is in the strength of its front line men.”

Kenya has never lacked anti-corruption institutions, laws, strategies, commissions, committees or public declarations. What the country has struggled to build consistently is a seamless connection between these institutions and the ordinary citizen who encounters corruption not as an abstract national statistic, but as a missing road, an incomplete classroom, an unavailable medicine, a demanded bribe, an abandoned project or a public service deliberately withheld. This is where the country’s anti-corruption conversation must now turn.

The launch in March 2025 of the Anti-Corruption Strategic Guiding Framework for Kenya’s Justice Sector was an important recognition that corruption cannot be defeated through isolated institutional action. The framework contains five pillars and 76 programmes and seeks to coordinate actors across the justice sector. Chief Justice Martha Koome observed at the launch that previous siloed approaches had not produced the desired results. That observation should extend beyond national institutions to the grassroots architecture of accountability.

The available figures tell a story of both progress and unfinished work. During the four financial years from 2021/22 to 2024/25, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission reports recovery of approximately KSh11.13 billion in public assets. Over the same period, the Commission reports that proactive interventions averted approximately KSh28.14 billion in potential public losses. Together, these represent about KSh39.27 billion in reported recoveries and losses averted.

These figures should, however, be understood correctly. They do not constitute the total “cost of corruption” to Kenya. Recovered assets are not the same as total money stolen, while losses averted are estimates of potential losses prevented through intervention. The true cost is wider: delayed development, distorted procurement, poor-quality infrastructure, lost investment, weakened institutions, diminished public trust and the humiliation experienced by citizens forced to pay for services that should ordinarily be available to them.

The 2024 National Ethics and Corruption Survey brings that human reality into sharper focus. Conducted across all 47 counties among 5,960 adults, the survey found that 30.5 per cent of respondents had encountered bribery, while 52.1 per cent had witnessed the giving of bribes in public offices. Even more troubling, 97.2 per cent of bribery incidents went unreported, with fear of retaliation and lack of confidence in reporting mechanisms identified among the reasons.

This is perhaps the most important warning for Kenya’s anti-corruption establishment. A corruption system can only be as effective as its ability to hear what citizens know, protect those who speak and act on credible information. If almost all bribery incidents remain unreported, the problem cannot simply be that citizens do not care. It may also mean that citizens do not sufficiently trust the machinery available to them.

This is precisely why County Anti-Corruption Civilian Oversight Committees, or CACCOCs, deserve renewed attention. Established to take anti-corruption awareness, public participation and oversight closer to communities, they occupy a unique position in Kenya’s integrity architecture. They are potentially the eyes and ears of the national system at ward and community level.

A national investigator may eventually discover that millions were irregularly spent on a public project. But the citizen living beside that project can know much earlier that the contractor never arrived, that the alleged beneficiaries do not exist, that the borehole produces no water, that the road exists only in a procurement document or that materials delivered to a public institution do not correspond with what was paid for.

The grassroots citizen sees corruption in its raw form.

That is why CACCOCs should not be treated merely as committees for public education meetings. Properly supported, trained and connected to national accountability institutions, they could become Kenya’s most important early-warning network against corruption. Their mandate could be strengthened through structured county corruption-risk registers, evidence-based reporting, project monitoring, public participation, referral mechanisms and mandatory feedback from institutions receiving complaints.

The problem is not necessarily the absence of institutions. It is the absence of sufficient synergy between institutions.

A citizen who identifies an irregularity should not have to navigate a maze of government offices before finding somewhere meaningful to report it. There should be a clear pathway from citizen observation to CACCOC documentation, referral to the appropriate oversight or investigative agency, investigation, corrective action, recovery where necessary and feedback to the community.

The same principle applies to county governments. Devolved government has brought public resources closer to the people, but it has also brought accountability challenges closer to the community. Citizens therefore need equally strong mechanisms to monitor how those resources are planned, procured, spent and translated into services.

Kenya’s anti-corruption strategy must consequently evolve from an architecture that primarily reacts to major scandals into one that prevents corruption from maturing into a scandal in the first place. The strongest national institution cannot be everywhere at once. Its effectiveness depends partly on the quality of its pointmen and pointwomen on the ground.

The military understands the importance of the frontline. So does policing, disaster response and public health. Anti-corruption should be no different. The strength of any huge force is the strength of its pointmen. If Kenya’s national anti-corruption institutions are the strategic command, CACCOCs can become an organised frontline—provided they are properly trained, resourced, protected and genuinely integrated into the national system.

The next chapter of Kenya’s anti-corruption struggle should therefore not be another declaration that corruption is a national menace. Kenyans already know that. The question is whether the country will build an accountability system capable of hearing the citizen before public resources disappear.

Kenya has demonstrated that assets can be recovered and losses prevented. The next test is whether those gains can be matched by a powerful grassroots system that detects corruption earlier, documents it better and connects the citizen directly to institutions capable of acting.

If that bridge is built, the ordinary Kenyan will no longer be merely a witness to corruption. The citizen will become an essential participant in preventing it.

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