The Governor, the Typewriters and the Missing Plane

Also published in the Business Daily on March 18, 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Abundance-of-fake-documents-slows-growth-in-business/-/539548/2247588/-/item/0/-/66hfx4/-/index.html

A widebody jet disappears over Southeast Asia. A dynamic governor’s credentials are called into question. A cabinet secretary is accused of antediluvian tendencies when she decides to tender for a consignment of typewriters. A package gets sent through the mail, and disappears at the post office. All these incidents may look totally unrelated, but they are pretty good illustrations of something that policymakers and the general public do not take seriously enough in Kenya – the question of trust in public documents, and thus the increase in the friction of commerce.

When the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 jet disappeared off Vietnam (or Malaysia itself – no one seems quite sure), investigators were frantic to not just find it, but provide an explanation. As the search went on, attention quickly settled on two passengers on the flight who seemed to be travelling on stolen passports. Although the theory that they had something to do with the plane’s disappearance was quickly debunked (the two simply seemed to be economic migrants travelling on suspect documents), police forces and air security officials used the attention to re-emphasise the concern over the epidemic of people travelling on stolen passports, thus compromising the security of air travel globally.

On to Kampala, where the Executive Director of the Ugandan National Council for Higher Education was arrested over the ongoing saga of the authenticity of the degree qualifications of Mombasa Governor Ali Hassan Joho. The case has grown and metastasized over the year since the election, and the Ugandan Criminal Intelligence and Investigations Department stepped in with accusations of obstruction of justice.

Then, in the middle of last week, came the news of the tendering by the Lands Ministry for typewriters. Journalists and online commentators had a field day, making mincemeat of the archaic purchases of what’s supposed to be a state-of-the-art government. The claims of some of those who sought to defend Charity Ngilu’s spending said that the typewriters were to ensure that land titles were genuine, and that the only way to do that was through typing the relevant documents up, and storing the used typewriter ribbons as the definitive, incontrovertible backup.

The thread that runs through all these is the fact that all the documents in question – passports, degree certificates and land title deeds – are crucial and enable important transactions, but their authenticity in many cases has been compromised to the level where they can no longer be trusted without extra verification.

When I was issued with my first passport and undertook international travel in 1997 (seems like just the other day, but it was such ancient times that aircraft still had smoking sections), Kenyans did not need visas to travel to many countries. Unbelievably, that year I travelled to South Africa, Germany and France without having to go through the rigmarole of applying at embassies for the privilege of doing so. And just a few years earlier, my mother had travelled to the United States and the United Kingdom with the same freedom – simply hopping on a plane and turning up on the other side. This did not last. By the turn of the century, the Kenyan passport was so mistrusted that all of these countries had started demanding visas of us – on ever more onerous terms. The influx of refugees, and the tendency by corrupt officials to sell the document to these and other undeserving individuals, meant that the Kenyan passport was no longer trusted.

Seen in this light, the CIID involvement in the Joho case is telling. The higher education trade between Kenya and Uganda is worth hundreds of millions of shillings, and the integrity of Ugandan degrees is paramount to this (after all, no student or parent wants to spend money and time to earn what may be considered a suspect qualification). The CIID then is trying to retain the veracity of these documents, and thus protecting an important industry.

In the United States and many other countries, the postal system is a bedrock of commerce. Goods worth billions are shipped through it every year, and individuals and corporations are happy sending cheques through the mail, confident that they will be reliably delivered. As a result, mail fraud is considered such a serious offence, and such a peril to successful commerce, that it is clamped down on hard. (After all, this is the crime that ultimately nailed Al Capone in the 1930s). Tampering with mail, theft by the post office, or misdeclaring goods in the system are serious crimes. In Kenya, though, mail fraud is considered merely a nuisance. But as a result, few people trust that their packages (or, indeed, cheques or cash) will be delivered intact and on time. This has led to massive inefficiencies in commerce, and the aborted take-off of e-commerce in the country.

To be sure, these are not problems that Kenya faces on its own. After all, Thailand was revealed to be a major fake and stolen passports centre. However, the less our crucial documents are seen to be authentic and trusted on presentation, the more friction there will be in our commerce, and the further we will be from economic takeoff.