Bribes Can Be Murder in Kenya--and Investigators See Link to Critic’s Killing : Africa: Corrupt industry minister refuses to talk to probers looking into the death of the foreign minister.

The subject was molasses.

As a Swiss business consultant recalls it, her Italian clients were planning a molasses processing plant in Kenya when she was called to a meeting with representatives of several Kenyan Cabinet ministers and their bankers.

To approve the project--designed largely to provide work for unemployed Kenyans--the ministers were demanding “commissions” of 10% each.

“(We) had to inform them that such commissions were not possible,” recalled the consultant, Marianne Brinner Martin. “It was reaching 50% altogether.”

Martin made a counteroffer of 5% total, which left the ministers unsatisfied. In the end, the plant was only half built before the Kenyan government ordered it dismantled.

“Looking back,” Martin said of the demands for payoffs, “I believe this may have been the reason for our problems.”

Martin’s 1987 meeting was business as usual for many ministers of the Kenyan government. But this week it took on added significance when a Scotland Yard investigator told a Kenyan government commission that such activities may have been behind the murder of a Kenyan official pursuing an anti-corruption campaign.

The victim was Foreign Minister Robert J. Ouko, whose broken and charred body was found in a ravine near his western Kenya home in February, 1990, days after he was reported missing. Now, after concentrating for seven months on such mind-numbing details as what Ouko had for lunch and where he drove in the days before his disappearance, the commission investigating his death has begun hearing evidence that his complaints about his fellow ministers’ greed may have provoked some of them to have him killed.

As always when the subject here turns to official corruption, at the center of the allegations is one of Kenya’s most unpopular, powerful and feared officials: Minister of Industry Nicholas Biwott.

Ill-tempered and thuggish, Biwott is a close crony of President Daniel Arap Moi. The minister has faced down similar allegations of corruption with such confidence that people here speculate that his hold over the president must be something quite extraordinary.

Biwott is said to have accumulated tens of millions of dollars in overseas bank accounts, possibly more than the president himself. Much of that booty derives from his years as Kenya’s energy minister, when his authority to set the prices of oil and gasoline--as well as his part ownership of a petroleum import and distribution firm--allowed him to extract untold “commissions” from oil companies.

Given the responsibility for allocating electrical power to Kenyan industries, Biwott was also well positioned to extract fees and commissions from a whole range of businesses trying to operate in Kenya. That is one reason he so prominently figures in Martin’s story, which was entered into evidence before the Ouko commission last week.

Even after Scotland Yard began its investigation of Ouko’s death--requested personally by President Moi and given his personal authorization to follow the evidence wherever it led--Biwott was secure enough to flatly refuse to be interviewed by the British detectives.

Nevertheless, the commission has received evidence that Ouko and Biwott had a personal confrontation over the latter’s greed during a trip to the United States just before Ouko’s death.

Ouko’s brother, Eston Barak Mbajah, said in an affidavit: “Biwott was so enraged that he threatened my brother . . . stating that he had had enough of him and this time he would pay the price very heavily.” Moi was also annoyed with Ouko for raising the issue, Mbajah said, and had all but dismissed him from the government by the time they all returned to Kenya.

Scotland Yard heard a similar version of what might have led to Ouko’s death. As recounted before the commission by former inspector John Troon, who headed the investigation, Ouko’s “allegations of corruption” formed “a motive for the murder of the minister.”

Lately, public discussion of Biwott’s behavior has reached an unprecedented pitch. All three national newspapers here have headlined charges against the minister on their front pages.

This week, the graft accusations leveled during the Ouko commission hearings were reinforced by a rare public outburst from this region’s most powerful multinational investors: London-based Lonrho Ltd., which operates agricultural complexes, tourist hotels, factories and trading firms in Kenya.

Lonrho Chairman Roland (Tiny) Rowland suggested in a letter to Vice President George Saitoti that Biwott had shouldered Lonrho out of some important government contracts because the company would not pay him off. The letter was published verbatim by two of the three national newspapers here.

Although Biwott had said he quashed the deals because they were on terms “unfavorable” to Kenya, Rowland countered:

“If any business was blocked by Mr. Biwott, then it certainly would be because it was unprofitable to Minister Biwott. . . . Everyone in Kenya knows that he has collected tens of millions in commissions, but not from us, and that is why we didn’t get the sugar or the pipeline or any other contract for that matter, although we were superbly qualified.”

Throughout the letter, Rowland referred to Biwott in terms redolent of the devil himself, at one point recalling how Biwott fixed Rowland “with a sidelong, yellowish glare.”

Biwott, in a printed reply, called Rowland’s remarks “wicked, false, malicious and defamatory statements.”

The drumbeat of criticism has many observers of Kenya politics marveling that Biwott has managed to hang onto his job.

“Only in Kenya could a minister be accused of graft on the front pages of all three newspapers--and nothing happens,” remarked a Western diplomat here.

Nevertheless, by some standards the latest accusations against Biwott come at an exceptionally difficult time for the Moi regime, which will be meeting this month with international donors already angry about corruption and Moi’s poor record on democracy and human rights.

The meeting will convene amid signs of Kenya’s steepening economic slide. The amount of foreign currency held by Kenyans in overseas bank accounts--a measure of “capital flight,” or the illicit transfer of money abroad--is well over $2 billion this year, a surprising leap upward from previous estimates and the largest amount ever.

Meanwhile, foreign aid is dwindling sharply, to $650 million this year from $950 million in 1989. That reduction has contributed heavily to two major problems. One is Kenya’s budget deficit, which it pledged to the World Bank to limit to 2.5% of gross domestic product but is now estimated at three times that. The other is inflation, now running at 25% a year as the government frenetically prints shilling notes to paper over its problems.

Moi’s political stature around the world has virtually evaporated as Kenya’s record on political reform and human rights has been bested not only in Eastern Europe but even in Africa.

In the last year, Africa’s successes in reform have looked like Kenya’s embarrassments, none more so than the Oct. 31 electoral defeat of Zambian President Kenneth D. Kaunda in unprecedentedly open voting. Kaunda’s graceful concession of office to his challenger was implicitly a rebuke to Moi, who has never even acknowledged the justice of free elections. Indeed, Moi has reacted to a pro-democracy group’s plans for a demonstration today by branding them “anarchists” and threatening to stop the rally by force.

Given this backdrop, some people here speculate that the unusual airing of the anti-Biwott testimony may mean that he might be jettisoned as a sop to corruption-weary donors, particularly if a bloody confrontation with democracy marchers occurs just before the donors’ meeting.

But predicting Biwott’s downfall is a dangerous game, as three members of Parliament learned just two weeks ago. Possibly emboldened by hints that Biwott’s stature with Moi had slipped, they began attacking him on the Parliament floor. But when Moi announced a Cabinet reshuffle, all three were stripped of their jobs. Biwott was moved from the Energy Ministry to the Ministry of Industry, a lateral move at worst and at best one that might afford him even grander access to “commissions.”

And Biwott’s refusal to meet with Scotland Yard might well match the real attitude toward their probe held by Moi himself. As Troon testified, his investigation was cut short “when it became apparent that I was requesting to interview senior members of the Kenya government.”

Instead, Police Commissioner Philip Kilonzo told him to complete an interim report. Troon recommended that the question of Ouko’s anti-corruption complaints be pursued as a possible motive.

“But I was not requested to pursue those lines at all,” he said.