By PRAVIN BOWRY

The unbelievable freedom of the press witnessed in the country in the last decade or so and the advent in technology need to be exploited by criminal investigation agencies and the criminal justice system.

From time to time local TV channels have aired vivid CCTV images and telling stories and incidents of criminal activity in the country but no arrests or prosecutions ever take place.  Social media is full of images ranging from armed robberies to shoplifting, yet the culprits are never apprehended.

In modern day Kenya, the mass media clearly has a pivotal role in fighting crime in particular organised crime and no attempt has been made to formalise and strengthen the bond to effectively deter crime. 

In the recent past, there have been amazing incidents in other countries where criminal activities have been disclosed, highlighted and pursued by the intervention of the press and in some newspaper organisations investigative journalism is now an integral part of the functions of the media.

A recent incident in South Africa comes to mind, where images were shown of police tying a suspect to a police van and pulling him leading to the suspect’s death and the outcry resulted in the culprits being apprehended and charged in court.

The ‘Standard’s’ recent attempt to show Kenyans notorious and corrupt acts of some traffic police officers on and around the Nairobi/Nakuru highway and other parts of Kenya is another example but sadly CID, the DPP and Police Oversight Authority have remained silent and not pursued the police in question or obtained evidence to charge and seek conviction against the wrongdoers.

Early this month saw the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal the off-shore identities and secrets of 1,000 holders of anonymous accounts in the British Virgin Islands tax haven.

Millions of internal records were leaked from Britain’s off-shore financial industry with ICIJ making sense of 260 gigabytes of information equivalent of half a million books!

The ICIJ’s explorations of off-shore secrets began when a computer hard drive packed with corporate data arrived in the post. The hard drive included two million e-mails which implicated 122,000 off-shore companies or trusts and nearly 12,000 intermediaries.

The data revealed unsorted collation of internal memos and instructions, databases, spreadsheets, scanned passports and ledgers.

It is believed that such information and high-end systems have been available and indeed sold for years to Intelligence agencies, law firms and commercial corporations, with journalists just catching up.

Computer programmers in Germany, UK, Costa Rica participated in the sophisticated computer analysis and hundreds of journalists were enlisted in the media investigation and over 2.5 million documents were disseminated.

Top-notch politicians from Canada, Mongolia, France, Russia, USA, Azerbaijan, Spain and the Philippines have been caught in the net. The records revealed an extraordinary range of people using off-shore hideaways and 86 journalists from 46 countries used hi-tech data to sift through the data covering nearly 30 years of criminal financial activities.

Off-shore investments and tax evasion schemes have become a reality in the Kenyan corporate world. It is interesting to note that over half of all world trade passes through tax havens and of these about US$500-800 billion comes from developing countries like Kenya and due to corruption and tax evasion schemes the taxman is losing millions of shillings in revenue every year.

change of guard

The ongoing wars at Cooper Motor Corporation Limited, a publicly quoted company allegedly reveals payments being made into off-shore accounts of prominent Kenyan directors of the company. Kenya Power and Lighting Company Ltd also has a similar history of accounts of holders of various offices and their political contacts in Jersey where billions were stashed by co-conspirators.

Since Independence, huge amounts of money from Kenya have been siphoned both from public and private organisations and despite public statements by various agencies about retrieving the funds from say the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing schemes, nothing seems to have been done. And as the years go by and with every change of guard, it will become exceedingly difficult for the relevant Kenyan agencies to keep track of the money or retrieve it.

Stories of Kenyan journalists being able to buy arms and ammunitions, or get fake titles, or Degree certificates, ID cards, licenses and of monies being exchanged in corrupt procurement and other deals are published in the local media but regrettably, the information passed on does not lead to the culprits being brought to book.

Also, the press is getting increasingly involved in assessing and revealing criminal activities related to terrorism and many attacks have been thwarted by the press taking a more proactive role in social media.

In Kenya, the offence of hate speech on Facebook and Twitter during the electioneering period had elicited some excitement from law enforcement agencies but that has since died down.

The DPP, National Police Service, the Police Oversight Board, Law Society and Media Council of Kenya in conjunction with editors of the major media houses in the country must get together and play a role in fighting the scourge of crime in Kenya.

The writer is a lawyer.

bowryp@hotmail.com