Citation:
Date Presented:
11 February 2012Abstract:
This thesis tells a story about money and politics in Kenya. All over the world these two topics represent two sides of the same coin, but in Kenya, a country notorious for its political corruption, as well as its extensive internationally-funded non-profit sector, money and politics intersect in complex, contradictory, and even revelatory ways. One part of this story concerns the way money and politics meet within the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), a popular and highly visible government institution expressly devoted to development. A second part of the story concerns citizen groups who undertake activities called “social audits,” which attempt to address corruption in the CDF through democratic mobilization. The final part of this story concerns the relationship of these accountability projects to a different source of money—international aid money—and the contradictions that this relationship generates. I draw on twelve weeks of mixed-methods field research in several locations throughout Kenya to weave an argument out of the multiple perspectives captured by this story. I engage with the theoretical framework of neo-patrimonialism, to anchor my analysis and offer what I consider a more nuanced way of understanding political corruption, and the fight against political corruption, in Kenya. I argue that the various “social audits” of government expenditure in Kenya represent a direct challenge to a political culture characterized by the state’s domination of the electorate. They do this by turning the laws the state uses to exclude the citizens into a weapon the citizens use to demand inclusion. Despite this, this democratic form of resistance remains weak and often ineffectual, due to the auditors’ dependence on an aid industry that has contrived to mistake this very dependency as the problem.