Plundering the forest: The criminal economy of electioneering in Kenya

* Francois Grignon.

Criminalisation of the state in Africa is one of the results of the full implementation of structural adjustment programmes. With the dramatic disappearance of the traditional resources of patronage (marketing boards, parastatals, etc.) ruling parties and authoritarian governments which managed to sail through the 1990-1993 years, have found it more and more difficult to finance their political activities and keep their clientelist networks. In Kenya, plundering of the central bank had allowed the ruling party KANU to finance its 1992 general election campaign. Five years later, and as the international community was watching closely the management of the country's financial institutions, trust land allocation and forest plundering, among other illegal and criminal activities, has become essential to the daily financing of the ruling regime's politics.