Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki returned from China’s expo with a commitment from the Chinese to build a new Kenyan port on the island of Lamu.

He called China “an important strategic partner.”

Hmm. That’s how Secretary of State just referred to Kenya: a “strategic partner.” Quite a phrase, that.

Kenya is on the threshold of a great decision. In two months the nation will vote YES or NO on a new constitution. Even getting to this point, of getting the Kenyan politicians to create a new constitution that in my opinion works well for the average wananchi was a Herculean task.

If it weren’t for the U.S., the U.K. and the EU, it would never have happened. This frontline of democracy and human rights bribed, cajoled and threatened Kenyan leaders until they finally… at the last minute … created a draft the population can vote on.

In fact when it seemed all was lost, good ole Kofi Annan jetted back into town to push the wayward leaders back on track.

So far, it has cost the consortium of good guys about $11 billion. And this is separate from ongoing initiatives like AIDS and malaria prevention, and separate from the several billion that poured into the country to stabilize it right after the political turbulence that followed the last election.

The west doesn’t want Kenya to fail. Why?

We say we don’t want Kenya to fail, because “Kenya is a strategic partner.” Untangle the myriad of meanings from that and you get to a fundamental core that “Kenya shares our values” which ultimately, of course, means that Kenya is OK with us dominating the world.

I’m not sure we would feel that way if al-Qaeda weren’t sitting next door in Somalia. We don’t seem to be quite as passionate about Senegal.

China, on the other hand, doesn’t give a hoot who is running Kenya or how they’re doing it.

“We don’t need lectures on how to govern ourselves. Lecturing us on issues that deal with governance and transparency is in bad taste,” Raila Odinga, Kenya’s current Prime Minister told Hillary Clinton last year. China never says a word about how Kenya should be governed, and certainly doesn’t care how transparent anything is.

The University of Nairobi’s Joseph Onjala warned Kenya’s leaders in 2007 that their presumption that China’s aid comes without strings attached was naive.

“…the aid appears to be very closely linked to strategic and political objectives, perhaps even more so than the aid offered by some European countries and the US. Chinese aid is …linked to the extraction and export of minerals and oil to China. These facts indicate that the aid might hurt Kenya in the long-run.”

Chinese money is much less than the west’s : about a tenth, although growing substantially year by year. And Chinese aid is nearly all for infrastructure. The west’s aid for such important things like publishing and disseminating the draft constitution, propping up Kenyan development agencies, and unloading tons of consumables like food, is all very important nourishment for a developing society, but it doesn’t last… like a road.

China’s building roads all over the place, now. See my earlier blogs. It’s mind blowing. It’s building a Kenyan railway. They just signed a deal to help build a new port. Build-Baby-Build. Just now it’s transforming a bit: it’s becoming Drill-Baby-Drill.

The west’s aid comes with enormous accountability, a huge reversal from the free-wheeling AID giving of the Cold War era. No accountability whatever to China. Now from an efficiency standpoint, the Chinese would prefer to send their own workers to build the road, which they do, and it gets built. But a lot more cash comes into Kenya to “build the road” than it takes to build the road. And China doesn’t care where it goes.

Yesterday, President Kibaki granted China 6 of the 11 potential oil spots new technology believes might exist in the Kenyan desert. Yesterday, China announced that the world’s deepest oil well (5800 meters: about 18000′ or more than three miles deep!) has been completed in Kenya’s desert. It didn’t say if there was something found way down there.

The west sees Kenya as a strategic partner for its values.

China sees Kenya as a strategic partner for oil.

Do these two “strategic partners” have anything in common? Actually, yes.

Yesterday Transparency International released its corruption list for 2009. All of Africa got worse when compared to 2008. In East Africa, Kenya is at the bottom of the pack at 146 of 180 countries rated; Tanzania is 126, Uganda is 130, and Rwanda is a pleasing 89. All fell from last year.

The United States fell to 18 from 17. New Zealand is the best in the world. Somali is the worse. The tiny islands of the Seychelles considered a part of Africa makes it the best in its category at 54, but South Africa at 55 is the best on the continent.

Corruption is linked to economy in a bell-shaped relationship. There is least corruption in times that are considered normal, when economies are performing in ordinary ways. There is most corruption when economies are either doing extremely well or extremely bad.

If corruption were measured by quantity, then the U.S. would be the most corrupt place on earth, and the undefined country of Bernie Madoff would outrank every country in Africa. With Enron, Tyco and a few notable others, the U.S. in aggregate followed by about a dozen of its smaller parts like Madoff would top the list of corruption.

Bernie Madoff lost or stole (depending upon how you look at it) 4 times Kenya’s annual GDP.

So what does this mean? It means in a very dispassionate way that corruption is driven by economic trends.

In the west people like to say this trend is greed. And to be sure, that’s a fair explanation for Madoff, Enron, Tyco and the like. It’s fair to say that in times of plenty, greed is the driving force of corruption.

But in times of want it’s quite different, and most of the time, Africa is in want of a lot.

The way I see it, intelligent and usually talented individuals rise to positions of power in African governments with the most laudable motives. Time and again I’ve watched a Jomo Kenyatta or Jason Zuma or Milton Obote be applauded into office with nothing but the most transparent ideals.

Time passes and Africa just doesn’t move fast enough. Misery grows faster than happiness. This isn’t the fault of these great men, or their ideas or management, but simply the institutionalized poverty in the world order.

The rich can’t get richer unless the poor get poorer, and we all know what side Africa is on.

And these intelligent and talented African leaders come round to seeing the truth of this.

Their education into this realization is mightily helped by many of the richer companies and individuals that come to their lands to “strike deals” for oil and other minerals, tea and spices. Outside the limiting laws of their own countries, these representatives of the less corrupt nations become the most corrupt deal-makers on earth.

All driven by the mighty dollar, driven by greed.

Right now, China is throwing money at Africa in unheard of quantities, requiring no transparency whatever. As much as $40 billion (US) has been given to East African countries in the last two years as blanket grants requiring no accountability.

And it’s not just China. I recently reported how the Toronto mining company, Barrick Gold Corporation, was unable to account for $1.6 billion dollars in payments to the Tanzanian government for the development of the world’s second largest clump of gold near Lake Victoria.

There is a difference between China and Canada, of course. China doesn’t care, so long as it gets oil. Canada is ashamed: it’s going to get rid of the mine as soon it can, but it was unable to impede the corruption.

So the African leaders give up. Once they realize there’s nothing significant they can do for their country, all that’s left is their family. And boy, a few dinners and drinks with Chinese or Canadian businessmen, and their family is set for life.

Today, most of Jomo Kenyatta’s family lives in Colorado. Jomo Kenyatta was the first president of Kenya. Most of Julius Nyerere’s family lives in London. Nyerere was Tanzania’s greatest president. And without doubt, I’m sure that these progeny are all upstanding, law-abiding moral folks.

Transparency International’s ratings, I think, are valuable for the countries rated least corrupt. But for those poor countries on the bottom, let’s understand where this all comes from. The dark force squeezes down the bottom.

How does that old teaser go? The island is sinking, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. There’s one little boat with you at the oars. Who do you row to safety?

Tanzania is Africa’s 3rd largest producer of gold and important producer of diamonds, but corruption is ruining the industry and the environment. PS: they’ve found uranium.

Yesterday an “inter-faith” nongovernment group near the rich gold, nickel and now uranium mines near Lake Victoria published a report claiming that the Mara River was now toxic with mine effluents.

The group which remains nameless for obvious reasons had taken the matter into its own hands after the government refused to act on a January directive by Parliament to “clean up the mines.”

This was no high school lab experiment. The study was funded and overseen by the Norwegian University of Health Sciences, which lent its name and credibility to the conclusion that the Mara River now carries high concentrations of toxic heavy metals at levels far above World Health Organization (WHO) standards.

The group laid the blame squarely on the Canadian owned North Mara Gold Mine. The Tanzanian government has demurred, so to speak, by admitting that the security at the mine is too lax to protect items like storage tanks and other hardware regularly stolen. The implicit argument is that these items are then poorly handled, allowing for ground water contamination.

(The area of toxicity is down river from the Serengeti National Park, so presumably not a threat to the national parks.)

According to members of the inter-faith committee, the study was conducted in seven villages after the unexplained deaths of 17 heifer cattle and six abortions between May and August.

Friday, notably only a few days before the release of this report, Toronto CEO of Barrick Gold Corporation, Aaron Regent, said that the Tanzania mines would be sold off.

He called the North Mara mine “troubled.”

I think it is troubled by more than toxic metals.

According to the London think-tank, Companies And Markets, Tanzania’s mines should be among the most productive on earth, but instead are falling far short of their economic value.

A 2008 report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre estimated that the combined loss to the country over the first seven years of the decade was more than $US400 million!

What?! Mine gold and diamonds and lose a half billion dollars?

The report claimed the loss was a result of low royalty rates, unpaid corporation taxes, and tax evasion by major gold mines.

Regent, on the other hand, insists the Canadian company has paid all taxes and royalties.

So where did one half billion dollars go?