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National media failing Kenyans on Pandora Papers

Kenyan media are doing a disservice to the public by framing the revelations as an
issue of legality rather than ethics.

Patrick Gathara
Communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.

6 Oct 2021

[Patrick Gathara/Al Jazeera]

The publication of the Pandora Papers, a significant investigation into how

world leaders and public officials use offshore tax havens to hide assets worth
hundreds of millions of dollars has caused a bit of a stir in Kenya. However, by
and large, the reaction of the Kenyan media has served to shed more darkness
on an already obscure subject.

Among those whose overseas financial arrangements have been exposed are the
family of President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father, Jomo Kenyatta, was Kenya’s
first president. That the Kenyattas, and other political families, have been
stashing massive sums of money abroad will come as no surprise to anyone with
a passing knowledge of Kenyan history. Easily the richest family in the land,
there have long been complaints about how the wealth of the Kenyatta family
was (and continues to be) acquired. The recent revelations about where it is
kept will simply pour more fuel on the fire.

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Even before he became president in 1964, Jomo Kenyatta was known for his
problematic relationship with other people’s money. In the book Kenya: A
History Since Independence, historian Charles Hornsby notes that as far back
as 1947, people had noted Kenyatta’s “desire for money and difficulties in
separating his personal financial affairs” from those of the institution he was
running. These traits would attain full expression during his 15-year rule and
beyond.

Functionally broke when he entered State House, by his death in 1978, his
family would boast, according to the American spy agency CIA (PDF),
“extensive holdings of farms, plantations, hotels, casinos and insurance,
shipping and real estate companies” with members of the family occupying top
public office and influential posts in large foreign-owned industrial companies
doing business in Kenya. The family would also be deeply involved in the ivory
and charcoal trade which decimated Kenya’s elephants and forests.

Today, the family has fingers in almost every pie in the Kenyan economy and
has continued to exploit its privileged position to milk Kenyans. In 2017, one
scholar described a partnership between the family’s bank and Kenya’s largest
mobile service provider to offer extortionate mobile loans to the majority of
adult Kenyans as “the extraction of surplus on a national scale for the
substantial benefit of one politically connected family”. Within the first 14
months of the arrangement, the bank was dispensing more than 24,000 loans
daily at an annualised interest rate of 90 percent, and more than 140,000
borrowers had been blacklisted by credit reference bureaus for defaulting on the
loans.

Where does all the money extracted from poor Kenyans go? Kenyans got a clue
in 2007 with the leak of a report by the international risk consultancy, Kroll, by
the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks. In one of its first major scoops, the
website released details of the 110-page investigation into the looting of Kenya
during the regime of Daniel Arap Moi, who succeeded Jomo Kenyatta in 1978,
which had been commissioned (and buried) by Moi’s successor and Uhuru
Kenyatta’s predecessor, Mwai Kibaki.

The report revealed how Moi’s family had created “a web of shell companies,
secret trusts and frontmen” to funnel more than $1.3bn into nearly 30 countries
including the United Kingdom. It is notable that the Pandora Papers leak has
shown that the Mois and the Kenyattas shared the same consultants, from the
private wealth division of the Swiss bank UBP, who helped them hide and stash
their money overseas.

Given the above, it is surprising that Kenyan media have opted to frame the
release of the papers as an issue of legality rather than ethics. The repeated
refrain is that there is no evidence the Kenyattas broke any laws with short
shrift given to questions about the advisability of allowing public officials – who
are paid to fix local problems – to not only stash money abroad, boosting
foreign economies, but, perhaps more importantly, to also hide their ownership
of it. When the Kenyattas and others who have relatively easy access to public
money can effectively disguise what they own in a confusing, Matryoshka doll
complex of foreign briefcase companies and foundations, how can the public
ever trust that it is not being robbed?

This is even more so the case given the ongoing attempts to extradite two
former officials for laundering close to $10m in bribes through the British tax
haven of Jersey.

The Pandora Papers come as Kenya is engaged in a discussion about wealth

declaration laws prompted by the government’s public outing of the riches
belonging to Kenyatta’s deputy, William Ruto – another politician linked to the
massive looting enterprise that is the Kenyan government – after the two had a
falling out. Kenyatta and his cronies have been trying to undercut Ruto’s bid to
succeed him as president in next year’s elections by exposing the fallacy of
Ruto’s cynical and populist attempt to paint himself as one with the common
masses he is suspected of robbing.

Kenyan public officials and their immediate families are required by law to file
wealth declaration forms every two years, but in a typically self-defeating move,
the declarations are kept confidential with penalties of up to five years
imprisonment for publishing or otherwise disseminating the information. It is
thus unclear whether Kenyatta and other politicians have actually complied
with the law and declared their hidden assets abroad.

The Pandora Papers also present an important opportunity to discuss the

culpability of Western professionals, banks and jurisdictions in enabling the
accumulation and camouflaging of illicit funds by public officials and their
families. According to Tax Justice Network Africa, for every dollar of
development aid that comes to the continent, $10 has left in the form of IFFs,
tax evasion and avoidance as well as corruption. And much of this money ends
up in Western economies – as the Kroll report and the Pandora Papers have
demonstrated.

“Tax havens play a facilitatory role in human rights abuse by providing an

avenue for hiding and laundering money which has been … acquired under
dubious circumstances” such as corruption, writes Robert Mwanyumba of the
East Africa Tax and Governance Network. And it is the countries that shout the
loudest about corruption that run and benefit from these havens.

The British Virgin Islands, where the Kenyattas incorporated one of their shell
companies, is part of what has been described as a “Spider’s Web”, which the
Tax Justice Network calls “a network of British territories and dependencies
[where the UK government has full powers to impose or veto lawmaking] that
operates as a global web of tax havens laundering and shifting money into and
out of the City of London”.

In fact, according to the Financial Secrecy index 2020, two-thirds of the top 12
most important financial secrecy jurisdictions are either in the US, Western
Europe or British Overseas Territories. When treated as a single entity, the UK
and its web rank at the very top of this index of abettors of theft and corruption.

The reporting by Kenyan media therefore does Kenya and Kenyans a great
disservice. By focusing on the legalities and ignoring the ethics, it strips the
issue of its potency as a driver for change and allows politicians to distract from
what’s important.

Already, President Kenyatta has welcomed the Pandora Papers as “enhancing

the financial transparency and openness that we require in Kenya and around
the globe” and acknowledging that “the movement of illicit funds, proceeds of
crime and corruption thrive in an environment of secrecy and darkness”. One
could be forgiven for imagining that it is not his own and his family’s lack of
transparency over the source of their wealth as well as their attempts to cloak
the funds “in an environment of secrecy and darkness” that is in question.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Patrick Gathara
Communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.

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OPINION
Opinions

Israeli surveillance and the end of politics as we know it

The Pegasus scandal showed that critics of Israel and its allies no longer have a right to
privacy.

Haythem Guesmi
Haythem Guesmi is a Tunisian academic and writer.

6 Oct 2021

Apple released am update of its current rmware for iOS devices after journalists, activists and politicians had
been targeted on their phones with spyware made by an Israeli company that specialises in the intelligence
gathering through personal, electronic devices. [Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images]

In June 2020, veteran Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Ghada Oueiss found herself
in the middle of a social media storm after her phone was hacked and a private
photo of her in a swimsuit was leaked online.

A network of Twitter accounts rapidly circulated the photo, baselessly claiming

that it was taken at her boss’s house – a blatant attempt to undermine her
journalistic work and intimidate her into silence. “I had never seen anything
like this before,” she wrote in a July 2020 op-ed for The Washington Post about
her ordeal. “What I read made me angry, shocked and scared.”

Oueiss is only one of the many journalists who have been targeted by such hack-
and-leak attacks in the MENA region in recent years.

New surveillance technologies have made these attacks so pervasive that not
only prominent journalists but many other public figures and private citizens
are now living with the fear of their data being stolen and shared online to
damage their reputations and careers.

In July this year, for example, an investigation by a consortium of media

organisations revealed that software produced by the Israeli company NSO
group, known as Pegasus, has been used by authoritarian regimes to target the
phones of politicians, journalists, royals, activists, business executives and
dissidents around the world. Oueiss’s phone, it turned out, was also infected
with this software.

The Pegasus software is so sophisticated that it can infect an iPhone or an

Android device even without the device’s owner clicking on a compromised link.
The software can then harvest messages, passwords, photos, internet searches
and other data. It can also seize control of the phone’s camera and microphone,
turning it into a surveillance device.

Also in July, Canada-based Citizen Lab, an organisation tracking illegal

surveillance and hacking which was part of the consortium that exposed the
Pegasus scandal, revealed that software developed by another Israeli company,
Candiru, has also been used to target the phones and computers of journalists
and dissidents across 10 countries.

Both NSO Group and Candiru insist their spyware is intended for use against
criminals and “terrorists” and say they sell the technology only to governments.
They also claim that they sell their products to foreign governments with the
approval and assistance of Israeli authorities.

It is not a coincidence that Israel is home to two of the leading tech companies
producing highly invasive spyware today. After all, the Israeli state has been
using Palestinians as guinea pigs to perfect its mercenary surveillance
technologies for decades. It has, for example, long been using state of the art
facial recognition software at checkpoints to screen Palestinians in the West
Bank. According to the Citizen Lab, NSO Group and Candiru recruit their staff
from the ranks of Israel’s intelligence services.

There is another reason why Israel is a world leader in producing surveillance

tech: the Israeli state is not interested in holding its surveillance industry
accountable for its excesses. Even after the Pegasus scandal, which led several
international NGOs to call for the Israeli surveillance industry to be regulated,
there is no sign that companies like NSO Group and Candiru will face any
sanction or serious investigation for selling their products to authoritarian,
corrupt and even violent governments and putting the lives, livelihoods and
reputations of tens of thousands of journalists, politicians, activists and
dissidents at risk.

International institutions and global powers are also not interested in

pressuring Israel to keep its powerful surveillance industry in check, or taking
legal action directly against these Israeli tech companies. Indeed, in the
immediate aftermath of the Pegasus scandal, the United Nations and the
European Union voiced their concerns about the Pegasus spyware, but fell short
of launching a legal case against the company that developed and sold it.

The lack of accountability surrounding Israel’s surveillance industry is a threat

to independent journalism, political participation and activism around the
world, and especially in the MENA region.

As Pegasus and other military-grade spyware produced by Israel’s surveillance

industry turn smartphones and computers into surveillance devices, activists,
politicians and journalists across the Arab world are becoming aware that every
private photo they take, every phone conversation they have, and every message
they send could one day be used against them. This is particularly true for those
who are critical of Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians or those
who are taking a stance against the many human rights and international law
violations of Israel and its powerful allies in the region.

This is not paranoia or hyperbole. Israel has for decades spied on and
blackmailed Palestinians who resisted its occupation and oppression. It has
even tried to spy on its closest allies including, as revealed by news magazine
Politico in 2019, the Trump administration in Washington. It provided
governments that support its foreign policy ambitions with technologies that
allowed them to spy on dissidents, rights activists, and political opponents.

There is no reason to doubt that the apartheid state is using, and will continue
to use, all spyware at its service to collect data on and consequently blackmail
activists, politicians and even common citizens acting and speaking against its
interests. What happened to Oueiss and many other pro-Palestine Arabs will
become a standard tactic used against the future generations of MENA
politicians and activists critical of Israeli policies.

Some may claim none of this is anything to worry about for those who have
“nothing to hide” or those who are “doing nothing wrong”. But an action does
not need to be “wrong” to be politically and socially damaging. As was seen in
the case of Oueiss, something as inconspicuous as a swimsuit photo can easily
be turned into something much sinister by those intent on doing harm. As is the
case with Israel’s many other policies in the region, spreading fear is the point.

Israel’s growing surveillance empire, which serves not only Israel but also its
allies, means that politicians, activists and journalists in the MENA region can
no longer separate their work and public personas from their private lives.

It means young Arab politicians and activists are facing a disturbing choice:
they will either self-censor and keep quiet about Israel’s many crimes to protect
themselves and their loved ones from terrifying hacks and leak attacks, or they
will give up their right to online privacy and stop using services and products
that are central to modern life as well as political and civic activism just to be
able to continue their work without fear of Israeli blackmail.

Pegasus, and undoubtedly other Israeli spyware we have not yet heard about,
have turned our phones and computers into surveillance devices at the service
of the Israeli state and its allies.

There is little hope that the international community will act to regulate the
Israeli surveillance industry anytime soon. As a result, politicians, activists and
journalists in the MENA region will be forced to accept that they no longer have
a right to privacy. This will mark not only the beginning of an even more sinister
chapter for our region, but also the end of politics as we know it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Haythem Guesmi
Haythem Guesmi is a Tunisian academic and writer.

Haythem Guesmi is a Tunisian academic and writer.

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About

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© 2021 Al Jazeera Media Network

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