New West Column
The West According to WikiLeaks: A Wyoming-Sized Economy
Rocky Mountain references from U.S. diplomatic cablesBy Brad Turner, 2-22-11
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses the staff of the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, a few months before the State Department banned Kenya's attorney general from entering the U.S. Photo courtesy Flickr user america.gov.
“… the return of even a fraction of these funds, which could be possible with a vigorous prosecution, could bring significant benefits to an economy the size of Wyoming.”
-- diplomatic cable from the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, September 2009
Kenya’s top attorney is a crooked politician helping to fleece an unstable country with a weak economy, a U.S. diplomat wrote in a cable released by WikiLeaks in November. Writing from Nairobi, the diplomat requests that Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako and his family be denied entry to the U.S. before he makes another of his frequent visits to America.
Wako, the diplomat writes, deserves pressure from the U.S. He has helped to institutionalize misconduct by Kenya’s leaders by refusing to prosecute corrupt Kenyan officials for the previous 18 years. In one egregious instance, the diplomat writes, Wako made no move to prosecute anyone connected to the Goldenberg scam, which cost Kenyan taxpayers an estimated $500 million.
Recovering some of that money, the diplomat writes, could have helped to stabilize Kenya and improve its economy—which the diplomat compares to the economic output of Wyoming.
Just how bad is the Kenyan economy? Here’s a rough comparision.
According to the CIA World Factbook, Kenya’s gross domestic product was $30.14 billion in 2009. That money was spread across about 40 million Kenyan citizens.
Wyoming’s 2008 GDP was about $35 billion. The state’s population is about 564,000.
In short, the people of Kenya could use an extra $500 million in the wake of the Goldenberg scam.
The diplomat who penned the passionate, 4,000-word cable got his wish. In October 2009, the U.S. State Department banned Wako from entering the U.S. for “obstructing reforms,” Reuters reported. (Wako responded by threatening to sue the Obama administration for defamation.)
Nairobi news outlet The Standard also reported on the cable recently, noting that Wako is “under duress to leave office” due to pressure from a Kenyan human rights commission.
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About “The West According to WikiLeaks”: As an experiment, I searched the WikiLeaks cables for keywords related to the Rocky Mountain West and read the documents that generated interesting hits. In dribs and drabs, the searches turned up snapshots of how U.S. diplomats refer to the region during high-level negotiations and how people from Rocky Mountain states help out around the globe.
is editor of New West.
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