President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya has promised a new lifestyle audit will show the assets of all public servants, including himself. His family is one of the country’s biggest landowners.
He told BBC reporter Zeinab Badawi on a recent episode of “Hardtalk”: “If there is an instance where somebody can say that what we have done or obtained has not been legitimate, say so, we are ready to face any court.”
President Kenyatta came to power in 2013 with a pledge to fight corruption: “This is something I am committed to and something I am determined to leave as my legacy in this country,” he added.
Mr Kenyatta said he was willing to have his relatives probed to demonstrate that no one, irrespective of their closeness to him or the offices they held, would be spared in the ongoing war against corruption.
“We can even go back to my grandfather, great grandfather, no problem,” Mr. Kenyatta said. “I’ve always said if there is an instance where anybody can say whatever we’ve done or obtained has not been legitimate, say so, we are ready to face any court”.
A Forbes magazine report in 2011 put the family’s net worth at $500 million, with 500,000 acres of prime land in different parts of the country. The 2008 Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission report that said his father Jomo Kenyatta appeared to have benefited “immensely from irregular allocations of land. ‘By 1965 Kenyatta is reported to have used his position as President to buy numerous settler farms’.”
The younger Kenyatta says it is important to note that all the land was bought fairly and legally.
