'With corruption everyone pays'.

• Author: Kuhlmann, Tobias
• Position: Kenya

When people in Kenya ask you for tea, they are often not requesting a hot drink but rather a bribe. For many years, this expression has been used to put a dirty meaning into nice words, as Kenya's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Judith Mbula Bahemuka recently explained at a briefing in April 2004. As useful as this euphemism may have been for many years to avoid the word "corruption", it does represent how corruption can turn a society upside down.

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Traditionally, inviting someone for tea used to be a symbol of hospitality, one of the values of which Kenyans are proudest. Ambassador Bahemuka and her Government want to revive this traditional notion of hospitality that is connected to tea, but, more important, they want to revitalize their country: "Corruption had reached endemic proportions in our society. It had ruined our schools and hospitals. It had destroyed our agriculture and industries. It ate up our roads and jobs. It robbed, looted and plundered our resources. It killed our children. It destroyed our society." Kenya's current Government is determined to alleviate these problems by fighting corruption, identified as the principal structural bottleneck to all its development efforts and the fundamental cause of the high levels of poverty, unemployment and social backwardness.

In December 2003, Kenya was the first country to ratify the United Nations Convention against Corruption. It was also the first time that a country had signed and ratified a UN convention on the first day of a signing conference, according to UN Legal Counsel Hans Corell, the Secretary-General's representative at that conference in Merida, Mexico. By this action and by the numerous measures it has enacted against corruption, Kenya has shown the world that it takes this fight seriously.

For many years, corruption has been a major impediment to development, not only in Kenya but also in many countries in the world. By signing the UN Convention against Corruption, more than 100 countries have made the most determined global commitment yet to fight corruption and its negative consequences. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan described in his statement on the Convention's adoption by the General Assembly in October 2003: "Corruption hurts the poor disproportionately, by diverting funds intended for development, undermining a Government's ability to provide basic services, feeding inequality and injustice, and discouraging foreign...