Eric Wainaina’s 2001 hit, Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo , is the natural soundtrack to the latest National Gender and Corruption Survey.
The 2025 study by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), published last week, confirms that graft in Kenya is no longer incidental, episodic or even exceptional. It is part of a deeply entrenched culture.
Like the value-added tax, it is regressive and non-discriminatory. The poor bear the burden more than the rich because it is charged at the point of need—such as when a child requires a birth certificate, or a sick family member needs urgent treatment, or a pupil wants to be admitted into a school, or a graduate is looking for a job. It is the gate pass to citizen services for a young adult who has reached the age of majority and needs a national identity card, or a suspect craving release from police custody.
The amounts are typically small, because Kenya is nchi ya kitu kidogo —the republic of small things. More than half of all bribes paid in 2025 were below Sh1,500. At the grassroots, corruption sums trickle in hundreds and thousands. Multiplied across 47 counties and millions of daily interactions, these small things become a national economy of extortion. At the national level, it translates into billions.
The cocktail of retail extortion at the bottom and grand theft at the top builds a kiosk economy where power is commodified to the extent that even the human body can become currency. Where money is not in consideration, as is often the case in the private sector, the report reminds us that sexual favours are very much on the table. Ultimately, as Jomo Kenyatta warned us, nothing is free.
Young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most exposed to the phenomenon of sextortion—the demand for sexual favours in exchange for opportunity or service.
Bureaucrats and other individuals in public service have captured public service and privatised it to be sold to citizens as a privilege. Rights are only rumours.
The survey points to a nexus between corruption and ethnic identity, where in some instances, bribery travelled along the logic of “helping one of your own”—whether it is in the police, the prosecution service, education or the courts.
The citizen is not merely a victim but a hostage. And citizens no longer list corruption as Kenya’s most pressing problem. For many, the real emergencies remain the cost of living, poverty and health care. This may seem contradictory, but it is not: Corruption is so deeply embedded in everyday life that it is sometimes experienced less as the primary problem than as the invisible tax aggravating every other problem.
Corruption has become a silent surcharge on citizenship—the unofficial fee attached to almost every citizen encounter with power. Its daily, habitual practice that has corroded the nation’s moral fibre until the occurrence of mega heists is no longer shocking.
This survey, unlike earlier ones, is an obituary for public service. It reveals that in 60 per cent of the cases where citizens pay bribes, they are only seeking to speed up procedures or to access services. A few times, they are paying to avoid a confrontation with State power.
The few who refused to pay bribes, according to the study, did not do so out of principle, but because the bribe was unaffordable. A few times, some declined to bribe because it was the right thing to do, and occasionally because they had other options.
Yet perhaps the most tragic finding is not that bribery is widespread. It is that reporting is almost absent. Many believe it is useless, and nobody would care about it. Corruption has ceased to be a scandal.
Most of those who paid a bribe or were approached for a bribe never reported the incident to the police, chiefs or the same institution of the officer requesting the bribe. Citizens did not report incidents of bribery because they thought it was an exercise in futility, or that it was acceptable to pay bribes, and that justice had been done because those who bribed had received a benefit.
Citizens have given up and surrendered to their fate. It is understandable, given that one of the nuggets from the report shows that magistrates—the officials expected to preside over the final leg of retribution for corruption—were themselves commanding the highest average bribe at Sh164,367.
With data as damning as what is presented in this survey, one would have expected the EACC to be jolted into taking radical action. Instead, it lists the textbook approaches of launching targeted operations, establishing secure anonymous reporting lines, and reforming service delivery payment, employment and procurement systems. There is also a proposal to increase awareness, even where the data shows that awareness is not Kenya’s problem. It is a wasted opportunity for change.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected] .
