FIGHTING CORRUPTION

The government will launch a system of tracking corruption within its ranks and making public its findings as part of the war on graft.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga said Tuesday that the numerous anti-corruption agencies in the country do not focus on systematically monitoring corruption within the government and naming and shaming public institutions overwhelmed by the vice.

He said measures to monitor and curb corruption within individual ministries and other state institutions will be included as key parameters to measure service delivery during the next round of performance contracting.

Mr Odinga was speaking when he received a delegation of government officials from Nigeria who have been in the country to participate in the release of the performance contracting results that were made public on Monday.

The officials, who included permanent secretaries from the Government of Nigeria, were led by the chairman of the Public Service Commission of Nigeria Ambassador Ahmed Alghazali.

The Prime Minister said the government will no longer sit back and wait for international agencies and NGOs to give it a report on corruption in the public service.

"We will not be waiting for Transparency International to tell us where the corruption is taking place and by what margin. We will introduce measuring corruption as a factor in performance contracting and we will be producing a report singling out corruption within government," the PM said.

"We will not sit back and fire fight and do damage control. We want to measure corruption ourselves and tell the public where we have identified it," he added.

Mr Odinga blamed corruption for the poverty and the state of under development in Africa.

"The continent is where it is today largely because of the way it has been governed. Africa's condition today is not entirely because of colonialism. Many African nations would be bankrupt today if they were business corporations," he said.

Mr Odinga faulted a system where promotion did not depend on performance.

"Because people were being promoted according to how long they have been in service, there was no incentive for workers to be creative. You can be a mere passenger in the system and still get promoted.

"People who knew they were going to be promoted after some time as a matter of policy just hang in there and did nothing and their promotion came. We are putting an end to that by rewarding merit."