Seems like a pretty biased, 'they're inherently corrupt' type of article until you get to the end, when it gets the nail right on the head.
Sir Edward Clay, Britain's High Commissioner in Nairobi, attacked Kenya's leaders and their tolerance for theft, saying officials were "behaving like gluttons" and "vomiting on the shoes of donors" who provide foreign aid.
Publicly humiliated, Kenya's politicians didn't refute the charges. Instead, they complained about foreigners interfering in Kenya's internal affairs and said the diplomat's remarks smacked of paternalistic colonialism.
"The failure of democracy and economic development in Africa are due to a large part to the scramble for wealth by predator elites who have dominated African politics since independence," says Tunde Obadina, economics editor of Africa Today magazine.
"They see the state as a source of personal wealth accumulation. Africa's tragedy is not that its nations are poor. That is a condition that is a product of history. The tragedy is that it lacks ruling classes that are committed to overcoming the state of poverty."
While Western governments increasingly link foreign aid to good governance and efforts to tackle corruption, they've also recognize that banks, businessmen and bribe-paying multinational corporations share some of the blame.
"When one focuses on corruption in Africa, the tendency is to think only in terms of Africa," says Jeremy Pope, a founding director of Transparency International.
"But the international banks, the Western businessmen who bribe to get the contract, those who are in cahoots with all the millionaires, they are all up to their eyeballs in what is taking place. When it comes to moral standing, everybody belongs in the gutter together."
At least the article seems to come around near the end, but the conclusion does not seem intimately tied to the rest of the article, but rather, is inserted as an 'aside', or, 'by the way, here's why corruption is so rampant in these places'.
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